Making It Rain! FWA on the Road to 5G Monetization

You don’t have to look too hard to see that the world is craving more connectivity and higher speeds. In fact, as the average number of people in a household continues to decline, the number of devices per household continues to rise. This trend is evident in a recent report that found “the total amount of fixed wireless access (FWA) connections is predicted to exceed 330 million worldwide by 2029.” In addition, said the report, it is expected that by 2026, the majority of FWA connections worldwide will operate on 5G mobile networks.

This is good news for mobile network operators (MNOs) who are looking for ways to monetize their significant investments in the 5G network. FWA offers a world of possibilities for carriers, delivering high-speed internet to homes and businesses without the need for costly installation of fiber optic cable. As the insatiable appetite for speed grows ever greater—with customers increasingly turning to streaming entertainment, online video games, and augmented and virtual reality systems, along with businesses relying on Internet of Things (IoT) devices and edge computing solutions in remote facilities —the need for FWA has never been bigger.

As FWA and 5G grow as an attractive alternative to cable and Wi-Fi, the key to delivering a consistently reliable user experience—one that provides ultra-low latency—will be end-through-end observability. Without this type of visibility, assuring FWA performance will prove challenging, resulting in continuous customer churn due to a poor-quality experience.

The Big Advantages of 5G FWA

For MNOs, high-speed internet service, made possible by 5G FWA, is proving attractive because it avoids the costly process of having to tear up streets to lay new fiber lines. Instead, lower-cost devices can be installed on rooftops or nearby utility poles. This allows MNOs to introduce broadband access in areas that might otherwise not have it, while also introducing greater choice in markets where customers have been relegated to wired service monopoly from a single provider.

Featuring speeds up to 2,700 Mbps, 5G FWA offers next-gen wireless connectivity with low latency. This is critical for mitigating lags, skips, and long loading times, which can impact mission-critical business applications favored by banks, hospitals, and manufacturing facilities, just to name a few. Residential customers are also looking for the high speed and low latency provided by 5G FWA for streaming content, surfing the web, gaming, and so forth.

Observability Down to the User Level Is Imperative

As 5G FWA continues to be rolled out nationwide, competition between MNOs will continue to heat up. The need to monitor and analyze control and user-plane traffic will be imperative to ensure the best user experience and to gain a marketplace advantage. MNOs must now implement comprehensive observability solutions to monitor, control, and user-plane traffic across the entire network, instead of simply looking at only a sample of traffic as was done in the past. This level of visibility will offer the critical insights needed to rapidly address interference and throughput issues down to the user level.

NETSCOUT’s best-in-class software-based end-through-end 5G 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. Armed with these insights, MNOs will be able to better manage the complexity of 5G FWA, enabling teams to ensure security, performance, and quality of service, and ensure a consistent and reliable user experience. This will be absolutely vital in expanding 5G FWA monetization efforts.

 Learn more about how MNOs can support 5G FWA success.