Fixed Wireless Access: A 5G Revenue Opportunity

Fixed wireless access (FWA) technology is accelerating the close of the digital divide in urban areas and underserved communities by allowing communications service providers (CSPs) to bring high-speed internet services to households and businesses. Through interconnecting technologies, FWA helps carriers manage network interference and connectivity problems in support of end-through-end traffic monitoring. Once implemented, FWA gives subscribers the access and speed needed to experience faster content downloads.

Increased Mobile Network Traffic

The transition to 5G non-standalone and standalone promotes increased virtualization and software-defined cloud networks. Monitoring and managing user plane traffic is crucial to avoid service failures. Mobile network traffic may potentially exceed capacities of more than 50TB/s in the next few years. And that traffic includes everything from video to voice, text messages, and applications. Mobile network operators (MNOs) need support for analytics and security across multidomain networks, generations, and technologies.

Lower Cost, Higher Speeds

When deployed, FWA provides a fiber-like experience for subscribers, but it is more dependable than fiber and boasts a far lower deployment cost. Consideration can be given to using both technologies in a hybrid infrastructure, using fiber for backbone structure and FWA for connectivity in certain instances, to achieve the benefits specific to each deployment use case.

Network Visibility and Customer Experience

Network visibility and observability challenges are becoming more complex and exacerbating even as carriers need more of it. CSPs will need to get the customer experience right by expanding their ability to observe network traffic at highly granular levels in virtualized and cloud-native environments. For example, the expansion of smart city technologies will require more FWA networks, and insights will drive the quality of experience for customers.

Case in point: Comcast CEO Brian Roberts recently acknowledged the increase in how much data consumers are using and noted the importance of examining performance indicators on bits per home versus only subscriber count to evaluate performance—a key insight all FWA providers should consider. FWA is the first scalable, revenue-positive 5G use case for CSPs.

NETSCOUT’s Offerings

NETSCOUT’s best-in-class software-based end-through-end monitoring solution provides the extensive network visibility needed to observe traffic levels and analyze applications for key performance indicators (KPIs) related to responsiveness, errors, conversations, user experience, and service dependencies by market—all the way down to the subscriber level. With these insights in hand, technology partners can better manage the complexity of networks that include 5G FWA, enabling teams to ensure security, performance, and quality of service.

Learn more about NETSCOUT 5G solutions.