How big are fixed wireless networks?

Uttlesford is tendering for in-fill wireless to cover the 20% of premises that won't be covered in the district, even after SuperfastEssex Phase2 attains 95% superfast in the county.
That's about 7500 properties.
May be a silly question, but I want to know whether deploying wireless broadband to say 3500 (ie 50% takeup) rural premises is feasible?
How big are the biggest current fixed wireless networks in terms of subscribers?

Most are probably smaller than that in customer numbers, but they tend not to talk about customer numbers so hard to know for sure.

Hopefully the tender will set out what the minimum expected throughput at peak times is expected to be, which is the key metric and will depend on the number of masts installed and backhaul capacity at these.

hi,

it is feasible, however 3500 premises is heading up the edge of the efficiency bathtub curve as there are only so many channels available.

We have 5 networks and the largest has over 1500 on it and also covers a significant area.

Technology however is continually improving in the Wireless arena so fortunately for the 9+ years that network has been running, we have been able to replace/upgrade infrastructure to keep chasing the ever hungry demand for data.

It all heavily depends on how well the network is engineered, if it is designed and put in by a seasoned team of Radio engineers with plenty of experience and understanding of the many pitfalls to avoid, then it will fly.

If it is put in by a marketing outfit who buys black boxes and gets untrained monkeys to build out the network with it, then no chance.

If these properties are spread over a large area then a cellular type approach means frequencies/channels can be re-used over and over in a non overlapping way, efficiency and performance can be maintained .

It also depends on how the network is fed , each one of our networks has a single feed point, this makes it far more cost effective , all but one avoid last mile Fibre too, choosing instead to directly link to a Teir 1 Point of prescence for example.

Others i know of will put a leased line into a village and distribute it just for that village. this makes the radio side a lot easier but increases the backhaul costs immensely.

I am not sure how you cover your costs/margins for that method to be honest, unless you charge a lot or get given a huge handout.

cheers

Well, the council is offering up to £100,000 for this, at 50% take-up that's up to £30 per property. Not a huge handout, and no mention of other sources of funding.
On the other hand they have had 21 indications of interest so I hope we'll get the seasoned radio types. Selection will be done in February.

hi,

We didn't express an interest here. to be honest it is an insult. If you look at the size of the council area involved and the pittance of funding offered then i couldn't see any serious competent organisation would go anywhere near it.

What would £100k buy in "BT" terms, a cabinet or two? if the construction costs aren't high anyway. that would be somewhat less than 10% of the property aims of this contract.

I fully agree that Fixed WIreless is far more cost effective than FTTC once you head into low density and rural areas. the costs can easily be under 10% with the same level of customers , Also without the speed variance with distance associated with long/aluminium/ancient phone lines.

The area in question has quite ruffled terrain and little if any significant usable hills, the infrastructure to customer ratio will be quite high.

The cost per property wouldn't even buy the customer premises aerial , ignoring the fact this money also has to cover the infrastructure , backhaul NRE , site rents etc

Best of luck to whoever wins this is all i can say and please, whoever does it, try not to screw up and give the Fixed Wireless industry a bad name it does not deserve. Like the wifi mesh networks of old did.

cheers

In reply to a post by SLAMDUNC:

Well, the council is offering up to £100,000 for this, at 50% take-up that's up to £30 per property. Not a huge handout, and no mention of other sources of funding.
On the other hand they have had 21 indications of interest so I hope we'll get the seasoned radio types. Selection will be done in February.

I'm afraid we do not have the luxury of choice. The district is so badly served by BDUK that any promise of broadband at a reasonable speed is a dizzying delight.
£100K may be aimed at the incumbent, Buzcom, to encourage them to expand their (line-of-sight) wireless coverage.

As a footnote to this discussion: the Uttlesford tender has been put on hold, because it has come a cropper on objections that the tender and possibly selection process were not open enough.
It seems that councils branching out outside BDUK to support FWA is harder than expected.
Do you know of any councils currently providing grants outside the BDUK process successfully?

Going outside of frameworks is difficult and costly for council's because of the number of hoops they have to jump through. A normal procurement is overly complex but when you have to take state aid into account it is even more difficult to deal with.

The only thing I've paid attention to is what our local BDUK project is doing - Superfast North Yorkshire.

They are running one of the Governments 10 (or is it 9 now?) market trials for phase 3, and have a couple of trials with Airwave. The feasibility study is here:
https://www.airwavesolutions.co.uk/index.php?id=470&...

Obviously there is a lot of money being fed into the trials simply because they are very one-off, and perhaps slightly over-engineered in order to get decent performance behaviour.

Right now, SFNY is overseeing the project, even if they haven't put funds in - but the last I knew was that they were waiting (pre-election) for central government to make up their minds about phase 3 funding, so they could decide where to bring the BT contract to a close, and to start offering FWA contracts instead.

The technical details I recall from looking at West Witton were that they intend to cover 150 homes, using 4 masts. They would then used 8 dishes to distribute the backhaul (including a link back to Leyburn), and 12 antenna for PMP connections to homes. Headline speed of the PMP kit would be 150Mbps, expecting around 100Mbps. That would average at around 12 homes per anntenna, if they were distributed evenly - but I vaguely remember chatting to someone who said the aim would be no more than 30 homes sharing one antenna.

Unfortunately, I only remember the financial details vaguely. Phase 1 for SFNY ran with a subsidy of £145 per property (over 150k properties) for the superfast portion; Phase 2 uses subsidies of around £900 per property (over 11k properties), though that assumes FTTRN cannot be used. IIRC, the next properties (if FTTRN remains unavailable) will need subsidies of £1700 per property for fixed line. I *think* the subsidy mentioned for FWA to the equivalent properties was between £500 and £1000 per property.

If the government goes ahead with FWA for phase 3 properties, it'll probably be done in parallel with the fixed-line work going on in phase 2.