On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 4:10 AM Mike Puchol via Rpm
<r...@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
Hi Bob,
You hit on a set of very valid points, which I'll complement with my views on
where the industry (the bit of it that affects WISPs) is heading, and what I
saw at the MWC in Barcelona. Love the FiWi term :-)
I have seen the vendors that supply WISPs, such as Ubiquiti, Cambium, and
Mimosa, but also newer entrants such as Tarana, increase the performance and
on-paper specs of their equipment. My examples below are centered on the
African market, if you operate in Europe or the US, where you can charge
customers a higher install fee, or even charge them a break-up fee if they
don't return equipment, the economics work.
Where currently a ~$500 sector radio could serve ~60 endpoints, at a cost of
~$50 per endpoint (I use this term in place of ODU/CPE, the antenna that you
mount on the roof), and supply ~2.5 Mbps CIR per endpoint, the evolution is now
a ~$2,000+ sector radio, a $200 endpoint, capability for ~150 endpoints per
sector, and ~25 Mbps CIR per endpoint.
If every customer a WISP installs represents, say, $100 CAPEX at install time
($50 for the antenna + cabling, router, etc), and you charge a $30 install fee,
you have $70 to recover, and you recover from the monthly contribution the
customer makes. If the contribution after OPEX is, say, $10, it takes you 7
months to recover the full install cost. Not bad, doable even in low-income
markets.
Fast-forward to the next-generation version. Now, the CAPEX at install is $250,
you need to recover $220, and it will take you 22 months, which is above the
usual 18 months that investors look for.
The focus, thereby, has to be the lever that has the largest effect on the unit
economics - which is the per-customer cost. I have drawn what my ideal FiWi
network would look like:
<Hybrid EPON-Wireless network.png>
Taking you through this - we start with a 1-port, low-cost EPON OLT (or you could go for
2, 4, 8 ports as you add capacity). This OLT has capacity for 64 ONUs on its single port.
Instead of connecting the typical fiber infrastructure with kilometers of cables which
break, require maintenance, etc. we insert an EPON to Ethernet converter (I added
"magic" because these don't exist AFAIK).
This converter allows us to connect our $2k sector radio, and serve the $200
endpoints (ODUs) over wireless point-to-multipoint up to 10km away. Each ODU
then has a reverse converter, which gives us EPON again.
Once we are back on EPON, we can insert splitters, for example, pre-connectorized outdoor 1:16 boxes. Every customer install now involves a 100 meter roll of pre-connectorized 2-core drop cable, and a $20 EPON ONU.
Using this deployment method, we could connect up to 16 customers to a single
$200 endpoint, so the enpoint CAPEX per customer is now $12.5. Add the ONU,
cable, etc. and we have a per-install CAPEX of $82.5 (assuming the same $50 of
extras we had before), and an even shorter break-even. In addition, as the
endpoints support higher capacity, we can provision at least the same, if not
more, capacity per customer.
Other advantages: the $200 ODU is no longer customer equipment and CAPEX, but
network equipment, and as such, can operate under a longer break-even timeline,
and be financed by infrastructure PE funds, for example. As a result, churn has
a much lower financial impact on the operator.
The main reason why this wouldn't work today is that EPON, as we know, is synchronous,
and requires the OLT to orchestrate the amount of time each ONU can transmit, and when.
Having wireless hops and media conversions will introduce latencies which can break down
the communications (e.g. one ONU may transmit, get delayed on the radio link, and end up
overlapping another ONU that transmitted on the next slot). Thus, either the
"magic" box needs to account for this, or an new hybrid EPON-wireless protocol
developed.
My main point here: the industry is moving away from the unconnected. All the claims I
heard and saw at MWC about "connecting the unconnected" had zero resonance with
the financial drivers that the unconnected really operate under, on top of IT literacy,
digital skills, devices, power...
Best,
Mike
On Mar 14, 2023 at 05:27 +0100, rjmcmahon via Starlink
<starl...@lists.bufferbloat.net>, wrote:
To change the topic - curious to thoughts on FiWi.
Imagine a world with no copper cable called FiWi (Fiber,VCSEL/CMOS
Radios, Antennas) and which is point to point inside a building
connected to virtualized APs fiber hops away. Each remote radio head
(RRH) would consume 5W or less and only when active. No need for things
like zigbee, or meshes, or threads as each radio has a fiber connection
via Corning's actifi or equivalent. Eliminate the AP/Client power
imbalance. Plastics also can house smoke or other sensors.
Some reminders from Paul Baran in 1994 (and from David Reed)
o) Shorter range rf transceivers connected to fiber could produce a
significant improvement - - tremendous improvement, really.
o) a mixture of terrestrial links plus shorter range radio links has the
effect of increasing by orders and orders of magnitude the amount of
frequency spectrum that can be made available.
o) By authorizing high power to support a few users to reach slightly
longer distances we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to serve the
many.
o) Communications systems can be built with 10dB ratio
o) Digital transmission when properly done allows a small signal to
noise ratio to be used successfully to retrieve an error free signal.
o) And, never forget, any transmission capacity not used is wasted
forever, like water over the dam. Not using such techniques represent
lost opportunity.
And on waveguides:
o) "Fiber transmission loss is ~0.5dB/km for single mode fiber,
independent of modulation"
o) “Copper cables and PCB traces are very frequency dependent. At
100Gb/s, the loss is in dB/inch."
o) "Free space: the power density of the radio waves decreases with the
square of distance from the transmitting antenna due to spreading of the
electromagnetic energy in space according to the inverse square law"
The sunk costs & long-lived parts of FiWi are the fiber and the CPE
plastics & antennas, as CMOS radios+ & fiber/laser, e.g. VCSEL could be
pluggable, allowing for field upgrades. Just like swapping out SFP in a
data center.
This approach basically drives out WiFi latency by eliminating shared
queues and increases capacity by orders of magnitude by leveraging 10dB
in the spatial dimension, all of which is achieved by a physical design.
Just place enough RRHs as needed (similar to a pop up sprinkler in an
irrigation system.)
Start and build this for an MDU and the value of the building improves.
Sadly, there seems no way to capture that value other than over long
term use. It doesn't matter whether the leader of the HOA tries to
capture the value or if a last mile provider tries. The value remains
sunk or hidden with nothing on the asset side of the balance sheet.
We've got a CAPEX spend that has to be made up via "OPEX returns" over
years.
But the asset is there.
How do we do this?
Bob
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Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
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