We have seen a significant uptick in interest and investment in fixed wireless broadband over the past few months. Approximately 30% of US households in remote and rural communities still lack access to high speed broadband, and availability of fixed terrestrial broadband services in rural America continues to lag behind urban and suburban areas at all speeds.
At CTIA Super Mobility 2016, the entire expo floor was transformed into a fully connected smart city with the entire wireless ecosystem assembled under one roof. On the Thursday keynote stage, Verizon Communications’ John Stratton and New Cities Foundation Founder and Chairman John Rossant explained what needs to happen to make smart cities a reality.
Shaw Communications agreed to acquire Wind Mobile in a deal worth approximately C$1.6 billion (around $1.16 billion USD). Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Shaw competes most directly with Telus and serves about 2.6 million cable TV, 2 million broadband Internet and 1.2 million digital telephone customers in British Columbia and Alberta, with smaller systems in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Northern Ontario. While the acquisition awaits approval by Industry Canada and the Competition Bureau, Shaw has been working to arrange the financing necessary to complete the acquisition.
It is time for bidders to start gearing up for the 600 MHz band incentive auction. This could be the last time a large block of valuable low-band spectrum will be up for sale in the foreseeable future. The Federal Communications Commission recently announced the schedule for the Broadcast Incentive Auction 1001. The deadline for broadcasters to file their initial Form 177 applications expressing their intent to participate in the reverse auction is Jan. 12. Each participating broadcaster that has completed an application must commit to whether it wants to sell all of its spectrum, engage in channel sharing or move to a lower channel or from a UHF to a VHF channel.
Small cell and distributed antenna system networks have become important and fast growing complements to deploying new spectrum and adding additional macro towers as U.S. mobile operators are focused on densifying their networks in urban areas. Small cells are becoming more common as an attractive option to increase capacity and extend coverage outdoors, and distributed network solutions are becoming increasingly popular for enterprise buildings and high-traffic indoor venues. Although these markets are in their infancy, they are poised for rapid growth.
Over the last few years, there has been much discussion about major mobile network operators (MNOs) using Carrier Wi-Fi as a tool in their arsenal to provide broadband capacity to their customers. And yet we have seen very few actual agreements between Wi-Fi service providers and MNOs to augment the operator’s current capacity with third party Wi-Fi capacity. The need is there for additional wireless broadband capacity, and the need will continue to intensify. There are a number of operators that are building extensive Wi-Fi networks in the US, in part in anticipation that the MNOs will buy some of their capacity.
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