Fixed Wireless: A Brief Recent History

Let’s start with a little story. Not too many years ago, right here on planet Earth, fixed wireless broadband was a pretty esoteric niche in networking. The available hardware was limited and expensive, the performance was terrible, and it was frustrating to work with. It was almost unheard of in residential applications and only found limited use in business. Most of it still worked in the same frequency range as microwave ovens, so you often couldn’t nuke a Hot Pocket and stay connected to the Internet at the same time. You can imagine how upset that made the nerds!

It stayed this way for several years. There were incremental performance improvements and expansion to cleaner and faster frequencies, but it remained expensive and finicky and not really ready for large-scale use. But the demand for Internet access to the home was exploding, and dial-up just wasn’t cutting it any more. Some cable TV operators started trying to fill the void with DOCSIS, but that only helped where people had cable. DSL played a role for a little while, but again access was limited.

Side Note: this situation is what we still to this day call the “last mile problem”. It’s fairly easy to transport communication services like Internet over long distances via fiber or microwave to “POP’s” (Points of Presence) like phone company central offices. The big challenge is distributing from there to the end users’ homes and businesses.

Wireless was an obvious solution, and the FCC was trying to help by making more unlicensed space available for the purpose. Determined engineers and entrepreneurs took on the challenge and developed some innovative, inexpensive systems that were instantly recognized within the technical community as potential game-changers. This triggered a sustained loop of adoption, feedback, improvement and price reduction. Wireless became the technology of choice to solve the last mile problem, especially where there weren’t good options. But then another problem began to develop.

Wireless actually became almost too cheap and easy to deploy. There is a lot more to building a good network than simply making a connection, but overnight every clown with a truck and a ladder was suddenly in the WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) business, and unfortunately many still are. “Look at me! last week I couldn’t even spell ‘network engineer’, and now I are one!” It is similar to how cable TV operators thought they could do data networking, just because some engineer invented the cable modem. “It’s just ones and zeroes, how hard could it be?” Must be pretty hard since most of them still haven’t figured it out.

But there is good news. Time, competition, and customer frustration are beginning to weed out the amateurs. The technology is improving at an incredible rate, to the point that new wireless technology frequently surpasses the performance of cable, and actually approaches that of many fiber-to-the-premises systems (more about those here). Given the inherently low cost of deployment, maintenance, and upgrades, the smart money is on fixed wireless to be at the forefront for years to come.

Now if you want to hear more about current wireless technology and where it is headed, read part two, Fixed Wireless: The State of the Art.