Opinion Paper

How to Build and Manage a Successful FBWA Business

Latitude Broadband, Inc. Copyright July 2008

All rights reserved

Introduction
Operating a telecommunications network is a specialized business that calls for specialized tools and skill sets. Today telecommunications networks have been successfully run for over 100 years and much learning and evolution has gone into the making these networks parts of successful businesses. By its very nature, telecommunications companies provide services to the public in general, that is why it is no surprise that most of the telecommunications operators worldwide either started life as government owned or controlled entities or as companies with special government licenses or franchises that ensured monopolies to the operators who were usually left alone for as long as the operators were able to provide the basic telecommunications services to the public. This basic service was initially voice telephone service. As technology evolved and electronic communications became more and more a part of the lives of many, newer electronic communication services evolved: teletext, fax, data leased lines, packet switched networks like X.25, Frame Relay and ATM. In parallel with this, the telecommunications companies evolved and became more competition oriented and so we saw a wave of deregulation sweep the global telecommunications landscape in the 1980s and 1990s and this wave today continues to reach even the small persistent monopoly operators in the 3rd world and in the emerging markets. In the mid 1990s we saw the birth of a new phenomenon called the Internet which further accelerated the birth of newer telecommunications services. First the Internet was accessible through private leased data connections, and then quickly followed by dialup, Cable broadband, DSL broadband, satellite broadband, wireless broadband and then mobile wireless Internet service. Today, cable, DSL, and mobile wireless Internet service are at the forefront of the connectivity revolution and form the platform for the new economies of the 21st century that are built on the connected generation. Although it is a scant 15 years from the birth of these technologies, cable, DSL and mobile wireless Internet have evolved to the point where the services are mature even though the technologies are still evolving. The business models and the operational models of these key Internet access technologies are likewise very mature and many different commercial products are available along with the operations and technical expertise that ensures successful deployment of Internet service based on these technologies. The technologies are built on sufficiently well established standards and large installed bases that the evolution of these technologies is gradual and not disruptive.

Network Management, Bandwidth Inventory Resource Management, Operations and Customer Management Key to a Successful FBWA Business
Fixed Broadband Wireless Access (FBWA) on the other hand is still not yet as firmly rooted as the other key Internet access technologies. Although developed at the same time as DSL and Cable broadband, FBWA was left on the wayside as a casualty of the complete dominance of cellular mobile telephony service (CMTS) that came into its own in the late 1990s. FBWA saw its roots in fixed wireless local loop (FWLL) service and wireless LAN (WLAN) service. Unfortunately CMTS completely displaced the business case of FWLL and today provides voice service in most places were FWLL was intended to be used. CMTS is universally available in the developed world and is also quickly becoming almost universally available even in the emerging world. For example, in Africa CMTS subscriber growth is sixty five percent year-on-year and CMTS penetration has reached twenty seven percent of the 965 million inhabitants of the continent. Fixed wire penetration only stands at four percent and is not growing significantly. WLAN has had its own share of success but has been mainly confined to the residential and enterprise space. WLAN technologies operate today at data rates far in excess of the fastest wireline broadband technologies (with the exception of fiber). The high data rates make WLAN difficult to deploy homogenously in indoor and outdoor settings over large geographical areas, however WLAN has been extremely successful for use indoors in homes and offices were the short distances and high data rates are very advantageous. This technology and capacity gap between WLAN indoors and WLAN outdoors has prevented WLAN from seeing widespread success in metropolitan level deployments. On the other hand indoor WLAN has created a huge commercial demand for the product, albeit not

as a telecommunication service but as an extremely successful local area network access technology in homes and offices. Today much of the unwired world is now serviced very effectively by CMTS but the broadband Internet is still largely un-served in the unwired world because of the capacity constraints of the CMTS network. Advances in CMTS data service like 3G UMTS, Mobile WiMax or LTE promise to bring the broadband Internet to the unwired world but realistically, even the latest high speed mobile technologies like LTE cannot cost effectively surmount the 44dB to 55dB signal margins needed to make the mobile broadband Internet a realistic alternative that can replace wired broadband in the same way that CMTS displaced the wired telephony networks in the unwired world. Fixed BWA on the other hand can already economically deliver the technology capable of replacing wired broadband as an alternative for broadband Internet in the unwired world. Technologies are in place that can easily provide 15 to 84 Mbps capacity in a 4 to 12 square kilometer coverage area while delivering 200 kbps minimum broadband speed up to 14 Mbps maximum subscriber speed. Because FBWA is a cellular-based technology, capacity is only limited by the number of cell sites deployed and the coverage area of a particular site so it is very easy to increase capacity twofold, fourfold or even eightfold in high demand subscriber areas. Achieving capacity densities of 100 Mbps per square kilometer is very well within the range of low cost high performance FBWA systems. Evolving BWA technologies promise to deliver even higher speeds exceeding 150Mbps per cell-coverage. Current FBWA access technologies are also capable of providing ninety nine percent (99%) coverage success rates at access network costs that are a fraction of the cost of a CMTS based broadband Internet network. The FBWA network is capable of providing wired broadband levels of capacity and performance precisely because the FBWA network takes advantage of the signal to noise
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ratio and resulting capacity gain that is available if the network is to be designed for fixed, outdoor, near line of sight operation. The 44dB advantage that FBWA has over mobile broadband networks results in much smaller, lower power devices with considerably lower computational power requirements. This simply translates to cost and capacity improvements. FBWA unfortunately does not have the wide installed base of the cable, DSL or cellular mobile networks. Consequently, the wealth of experience and expertise in the deployment of FBWA networks simply does not exist. CMTS and DSL networks today are easily financially modeled in terms of a cost per subscriber deployment because the deployment and operational models are already very well established and costs of operating these networks are very well understood. In order for FBWA to be commercially successful, issues beyond the technology need to be addressed. The two most important aspects that need to be addressed are the overall reliability of the service and the business model and management of the service. Since there is no well established template for the design, deployment and operation of the FBWA business the challenge of deploying a successful FBWA business is increased. The first challenge facing most new FBWA deployments is low installation success. Unlike in CMTS where the planning and deployment models are very well established, FBWA deployment models are still clouded by radio manufacturer hype and over-promising. Very few deployments worldwide have gone over the 50,000 subscriber figure and so very little factual performance exists to validate the many existing models. Installation successes rates of 80% or below are quite common. Poor success rates and poor connection quality aggravated by self interference can quickly limit deployments. This is one of the main reasons why in spite of the several thousand FBWA deployments that have been made over the past ten years, most deployments have grown only to the size that can be handled by

available resources for technical support and maintenance. Poor overall network reliability and performance are truly limiting factors. The situation is further aggravated by the nature of broadband service where subscriber usage and capacity tends to grow very quickly. It is not unusual to see 50% to 100% annual subscriber bandwidth usage growth in new FBWA deployments. This can lead very quickly to networks with insufficient capacity to provide the promised broadband service performance. Low installation success rates are not preordained by existing technology. In fact, it is very well within the ability to build FBWA systems with 99% or better service coverage and connection success. Radio access network design for FBWA unfortunately is not well understood by many operators, some of whom have extensive experience in deploying CMTS systems. Cellular phones need to carry the lowest common denominator services: sms data and low bit rate voice. FBWA systems need to be able to consistently deliver high speed data at unvarying levels of QoS. The requirements of building high capacity FBWA networks with consistent QoS impose constraints that even the CMTS networks dont have. In a mobile network, a connection is made to the base station with the best connection. If the conditions change, perhaps as a result of congestion or network failure, the mobile phone usually can still get service from other base stations in the network. In FBWA, the connection is to a specific base station and any variations in connection quality can cause failed connections. In a CMTS network, it is quite common for operators to think Its alright to lose a BTS since I have another 1,000 of them anyway, and the subscribers with dropped calls will just connect to another BTS even if they have to live with poorer voice connection quality and severely reduced data capacity. In the past, radio engineers took great pains to engineer microwave radio links in order to assure five nines performance. Today, most FBWA networks are designed like CMTS
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networks or worse like WLANs without providing the proper engineering framework to assure uncompromised radio connection quality. This is the main reason for very low installation success rates, inconsistent QoS and inferior Internet user experience. Most of the failure is a failure of design methodology rather than of technology. Customer deployments in FBWA also require special attention. In cases where the FBWA network is used to deliver high revenue service to corporate clients, installers can spend the time and effort necessary to properly activate a customer radio connection in much the same way a microwave link might be activated. In residential deployments, the low revenue and high subscriber counts demand an access network design that simplifies the installation to the level of an outdoor TV antenna installation. This again requires the proper access radio network design methodology one that incorporates sufficient link margins in the network design so as to simplify and shorten the subscriber installation effort. Unless the installation effort can be reduced to two man hours or less, it almost always becomes uneconomical to deploy residential FBWA service. In addition to proper access radio design, it is necessary to establish and implement operations processes to assure that: connections are being made to the correct sectors on a bases station, installers do not install on sector back lobes and side lobes, subscribers radio receive signal link are within acceptable levels, range limits are not exceeded and sector capacities are not violated. All these are non-issues in CMTS but spell the difference between growth and stagnation for an FBWA operator. Once the operator has deployed a well designed access radio system, it is ironic to think that often, the network is unable to provide the required QoS because of the failure to deliver reliable bandwidth to base stations. Often, FBWA operators will rely on DSL to deliver bandwidth to base stations were FBWA has been deployed precisely because of the poor coverage of DSL or other wire-line service. Very often to address this

contradiction, point to point wireless radio links will be used to deliver the backhaul to the FBWA base stations. This is patterned very much after the way backhaul is delivered in CMTS networks in areas with poor wire-line coverage. In the CMTS, the point to point backhaul radios are usually organized as trees or stars where the backhauls aggregate data from the cell sites and data flows upwards to high speed backbone networks that tie these backhaul trees together. When comparing the FBWA backhaul network versus the CMTS backhaul network, there are however two major differences that a FBWA operator must contend with. First, the requirements for backhaul resiliency and redundancy in a CMTS network are not as severe as that for a FBWA network. If a CMTS cell site loses its backhaul connection, the mobile user automatically connects to another cell site. If a FBWA base station fails, all subscribers on the base station lose service. The CMTS derived approach for wireless backhaul design puts the FBWA network backhaul in an unenviable position of both being mission critical and a single point of failure. This requires that the designer must be aware of the elevated reliability requirements of backhaul in an FBWA network. Network elements in the backhaul and backbone networks should not be measured for reliability in terms of mean number of downtime hours. Performance should be measured in terms of number of subscriber downtime hours. A subscriber radio that is down for 24 hours produces 24 hours of subscriber downtime. A backhaul link that is supplying a base station with 200 subscribers will generate 4,800 hours of subscriber downtime if it fails for just one day. This is not the case in CMTS were the subscriber will simply connect at degraded levels to another nearby base station. The second major difference arises because most FBWA networks operate using the Internet Protocol (IP). IP provides a mechanism to add resilience to the FBWA backhaul and backbone networks. In order to take advantage of this
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capability, IP based resiliency must be designed into the backhaul and backbone network. In the PSTN based networks, reliability is achieved by implementing link level reliability. A phone call is routed through the PSTN in a pre-selected path and so all the links contained in that path need to be operational to complete a phone call. In the Internet, reliable connections between two end points can be achieved through the existence of multiple network paths that may traverse different links. To further complicate matters, the Internet Protocols require some form of load balancing to prevent data flows from simply following the lowest cost paths and possibly causing unwarranted congestion when other paths are available. The implementation of resilient IP networks and load balanced data flows requires a thorough understanding of IP protocols such as RIP, OSPF, MPLS, BGP and IBGP. The complexity of a modest FBWA network containing several dozen base stations that are optimized to provide IP network resilience and load balancing can easily dwarf the complexity of most corporate networks or even large dial up or DSL based ISPs. This can happen because of the large number of IP links that can interact producing many different possible IP routes in the network. In the PSTN backhaul connections used in most CMTS networks, the connections are static and link level reliability is all that is required. In an IP based backhaul of a FBWA network, the expertise levels required to assure proper and reliable operation of the network are quite high. In a PSTN type network, very high expertise is necessary in the design and implementation of the network, but only moderate levels of expertise are necessary for operating the network. In a large IP network, even the day to day operation requires a high level of protocol expertise not normally needed in enterprise or wired ISP networks. Once an operator has built a FBWA network that can deliver complete blanket coverage and end-to-end network reliability, the operator still needs to make sure that the resources he

has put in place are properly utilized so as to maximize the business potential of his network. Two things are critical. First the operator must implement a subscriber access control and resource management system and secondly, the information infrastructure must be put in place to be able to allow the operator to maximize the use of the resources and network and subscriber related information that exists in the FBWA network. In the WLAN that is commonly found in business enterprises and homes, the access network is a shared resource that is freely available to all users. In the commercial FBWA network, the access network represents network capacity or network bandwidth inventory that is to be sold along with global Internet access gateway capacity to the subscribers of the broadband Internet service. Network capacity can be treated as inventory. Like regular inventory once the nonoversubscribed component of capacity is sold it cannot be sold to someone else. Doing so will shortchange every customer in the network. Likewise, if the network capacity is stolen or taken because of poor inventory management, the revenue is lost to the detriment of the operator and even other subscribers. Lost capacity does not necessarily only belong to the operator, a subscriber who paid for a certain capacity may also be the loser if the operator does not prevent other subscribers or worse, illegal users from using the capacity already rightfully sold to a subscriber. The issue is even further aggravated because in an FBWA network, the capacity of the base station is limited and must be shared with multiple users on the base station. In DSL, the access network capacity in a single DSL wire is exclusive to the DSL subscriber. So if a DSL subscriber exceeds the usage sold to him, he does not encroach on the capacity of the access network reserved for other customers. He will however take more than his fair share of backhaul and backbone capacity and/or Internet access gateway capacity. Access control and network resource inventory management can be implemented
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through the use of a subscriber bandwidth manager that is automatically provisioned by the access control system based on the amount of bandwidth a subscriber has purchased. A bandwidth manager designed to provide optimum bandwidth utilization must be able to distinguish between non-oversubscribed or dedicated bandwidth and oversubscribed or burst bandwidth. Such a bandwidth manager will allow subscribers to benefit from the availability of burst bandwidth in the system while strictly making sure that every subscriber has access to their non-oversubscribed, dedicated bandwidth at all times. In most commercially deployed vendor driven FBWA network, the backhaul network will normally have greater capacity than the access network, in this scenario, it is desirable but not necessary that the bandwidth manager is aware of the capacity of the backhaul network. However, in a pay as you grow backhaul design approach where backhaul capacity on day one is less than the access network (base station), it is a necessity that the bandwidth manager is aware of the backhaul network capacity to ensure effective delivery of QoS. The pay as you grow approach allow the operator to purchase lower capacity and therefore inexpensive backhauls without having to worry about subscriber QoS being affected. (Cost of backhaul is typically thirty to fifty percent of the initial network capital outlay but becomes a smaller percentage of the total network cost as more subscribers are added to the network.) Since broadband ISPs do not only sell network capacity but also Internet gateway access capacity, the bandwidth manager system must also be aware of the capacity of the Internet gateway access bandwidth and must be able to manage subscriber bandwidth so as not to exceed the non-oversubscribed or dedicated capacity of the Internet gateway. Managing the FBWA network is every bit as challenging as managing a modern PSTN or CMTS network. Unfortunately, FBWA does not have the maturity and installed base of the PSTN or CMTS networks and the large selection of commercially available information systems

designed to give management the necessary data inputs and automation capability that is needed to properly manage the business. The existing IT systems for PSTN or CMTS networks span the entire range of functions necessary to successfully run a telecommunications business including billing, sales, financials, administration, operations, provisioning, network management and customer care and management. Many of the existing software applications are usable in the FBWA network. Unfortunately, because FBWA is not a standardized application like GSM for instance, the core authentication, provisioning and network management systems are not yet standardized for FBWA. GSM for instance has the standardized SIM device and the HLR for authentication. Interfaces for billing into PSTN and CMTS switches are quite standardized. Therefore it is necessary to either build or acquire these core systems.

FBWA is not only a viable means of delivering broadband Internet service, it also has natural advantages versus wired broadband networks when deployed in areas that are currently underserved by effective copper wire infrastructure. FBWA is not only an alternative for the small scale wireless ISP but can be deployed successfully in the large scale as evidenced by the half million (500,000) subscriber network of Smart Bro in the Philippines. FBWA however is still an immature market segment and therefore the choice of technologies and partners can mean the difference between a successful business and a white elephant. The FBWA business success hinges on being able to deliver reliable broadband service to all subscribers in a targeted coverage area. To do this, the operator must have a well designed and well run radio access network and IP backhaul and backbone network along with the necessary expertise to ensure these networks function properly. In addition, the operator must have in place the resource people and the information systems that can provide the visibility to manage efficiently the various FBWA network elements, bandwidth inventory resources of the entire network and the end-to-end operations of the FBWA business.

How to Build and Manage a Successful FBWA Business

Latitude Broadband Inc.
Building 7, FTI Complex Taguig City 1630 Philippines Telephone Facsimile E-mail Website : +632 828-0240 : +632 828-1206 : info@latitudebroadband.com : www.latitudebroadband.com