Dramatic changes in LTE landscape bust myths, provide FirstNet with new options

There are certain locations that wireless carriers will never cover with LTE or other terrestrial broadband technologies, because they don’t make economic sense: This long-held notion has not been debunked entirely, but the equation for determining what makes economic sense appears to be changing rapidly. As LTE is deployed globally, lower-cost options for radio-access-network (RAN) infrastructure and the evolved packet core (EPC) are emerging, including small-cell gear, indoor solutions, boomer cells and deployable coverage.

Of course, a fundamental prerequisite for wireless broadband is that the traffic needs adequate backhaul, which traditionally has been lacking in rural areas and is expensive to deploy in such areas. But those economics could change soon, as the FCC plans to make broadband—not copper wires—the base level of connectivity available to schools and libraries via the E-Rate program and to residential households via the Connect America program in the Universal Service Fund (USF) program.

To make that broadband vision a reality, lots of fat backhaul pipes—mostly fiber, microwave, millimeter-wave and free-space-optics technologies—will need to be deployed in geographic locations that were lucky to have a copper wire previously. And, where there is ample backhaul, there is an opportunity to deploy wireless LTE economically, particularly with approaches such as boomer-cell technologies in rural areas. And don’t forget that utilities and transportation authorities are expected to deploy more broadband to support smart-grid and intelligent-transportation initiatives.

What does all this mean to FirstNet? The fledgling organization has options available to it today that could not have been foreseen when Congress created FirstNet less than three years ago. This doesn’t mean that it will be easy—more options and more sites (10 times more, according to Verizon) threaten to increase network-management complexity, and cybersecurity and business modeling promise to be significant challenges—but broadband-ecosystem developments mean that FirstNet does not have to be tied to any single deployment model throughout its buildout.