African operators facing FWA 'cannibalization-WIM Technologies

Fixed wireless access (FWA) is becoming a dominant market opportunity for many mobile operators in Africa and worldwide as they try to provide low-cost data services to their customers in locations where fixed wireline access or fiber rollout is not feasible.

However, as FWA grows, local operators are running into challenges, including the risk of service "cannibalization," which impacts revenue growth and service assurance according to telecoms solutions provider WIM Technologies.

Because FWA terminals are usually quite small, users can move their service from one location to another without the operator being aware.

"The main challenge that operators have when providing a fixed wireless service that uses their mobile network is the risk of this cannibalizing on their mobile services. When providing a terminal for fixed wireless access – which uses the mobile network in the same way as a mobile phone does – it's meant to be fixed and stay in the specific location. But if this is not really assured, there's nothing stopping the user of taking this with them and going to another location," Nik Angelov, head of product strategy at WIM Technologies told Connecting Africa in an interview.

This may seem like a smart cost-saving choice for the user, but for mobile operators, it is impacting their bottom lines and user acquisitions.

"If a person wants fixed wireless access at home and the office, that's two services. That's two contracts and revenue streams. But if the user takes it in the morning to work, then takes it with them back in the evening for home then this impacts business opportunity [for operators]," he explained.

He gave some use cases reported by operators of users "reselling" their FWA service to third parties.

"For example, one use case from an operator was that a user would take [their FWA terminal] to work at a local market and then provide effectively free wireless access to friends that work with them at the market as well. So essentially, this cannibalizes on the mobile services that the operator might provide to all these other people. This is undercutting the operator and could be a cost-saving for the user but it's obviously not good for the operator."

Angelov said that the risk to operators of this kind of case is they will be unable to gain more customers and the ones they have will use less data – which in turn drives less revenue to operators.

Challenges to quality-of-service assurance

This trend also brings issues of quality-of-service as operators would guarantee a certain quality-of-service for an FWA contract in a specific location, but can't assure that quality will remain the same if the terminal is moved to a different location.

"The thing is your coverage is not really the same everywhere and the network is not dimensioned to the same capacity everywhere. So, if the operator provides a service for fixed wireless access, they would have first assured that the person can connect to the network and have very good connectivity to nearby cell tower. They'll dimension the capacity accordingly for that individual as well as the whole network and other fixed wireless terminals they have in the area," Angelov explained.

"If the user moves it to a different location, then the service might be different. So, the connectivity to the cell tower might have gotten worse, which will decrease the broadband speed. The user could then start complaining to the operator that they don't provide the service that they paid for. But the operator has no way of assuring and guaranteeing that – so that's the challenge on the practical side," he added.

"There's a lot of risk to revenue growth and service assurance of all of this. So the challenge is to actually assure that this terminal is used in the specific location where the contract is for."

Multi-vendor approach

WIM Technologies counters this issue with its platform, called Unison, that allows for automated configuration and governance of FWA subscribers, ensuring that the service is limited to a specific geographic area by restricting which mobile cells the subscriber is allowed to connect to.

The company specializes in software for the automation and management of radio access networks and focuses on providing software suited for a multi-vendor network.

"This is now becoming a reality for pretty much all networks as they are trying to diversify and going on the journey with open RAN. In the context of fixed wireless access, we have created a product that is very much targeted for the African market, in effect, we're trying to solve a solution with fixed wireless access.

"I would say Africa is one of the biggest markets for fixed wireless access, since wired access is a bit more challenging to provide to rural areas due to cost of deployments or cost of maintenance, including theft," he explained.

WIM Technologies Unison platform in use. (Source: WIM Technologies)

The challenge to stop cannibalization, he said, is to ensure that the user can connect to the network only within a specific area.

"The way we actually do this is we use our ability to speak the language of the radio networks configuration and dynamically reconfigure the specific parameters that allow those terminals to connect only to specific cells."

"We combine our knowledge in allowing operators to do this on any vendor that they have. Simultaneously the solution will dynamically modify this type of settings so that when a new contract is being set up, this is automatically applied to a network – so the configuration is effectively on the radio part of the network. That assures that users are limited to only a specific area," he added.

5G fixed wireless access

Using an existing 4G/5G radio access network (RAN) to provide the backhaul for FWA services is a major opportunity for operators as it allows them to roll out fiber-like offerings to users by leveraging their existing mobile infrastructure.

WIM Technologies' service is aimed at both 4G and 5G networks, but Angelov said 5G is the main focus going forward.

"5G is the bigger potential from an infrastructure perspective. On one side, 5G allows for tremendous capacity that you can't achieve with 4G. So, operators are targeting faster 5G deployment and using 5G exclusively for fixed wireless access, primarily, because they can then provide a huge amount of contracts in that specific area and they can assure that they always will have very good connectivity," he said.

"From a technology perspective, what 5G allows is the uplink and downlink speeds and the latency which are comparable or could actually be better than wired broadband. So we're talking about latency below two milliseconds, which is extremely fast. Unless you have fiber to the premises, you won't be able to compete with that."

"By installing just one mast in a locality, you're able to serve so many customers with just that single antenna rather than having to lay optical cables at all different houses or different premises. That the opportunity really meant for rolling FWA out easily and cheaply," he continued.

Ambitions for growth in 2023

WIM Technologies is already working with operators in South Africa with aims to grow its footprint across Africa in the future.

"South Africa is our primary market, our headquarters are based in in South Africa. We understand that market well, and we see the growth for FWA services there to be gaining a lot of momentum," he said.

"However, we are looking at all of Africa. We see that this is picking up a lot in other countries like Nigeria and Kenya as well, so it's slowly rolling out to the majority. When we talk about priorities for 2023 our main focus is really sub-Saharan Africa," he concluded.

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*Top image is of Nik Angelov, head of product strategy at WIM Technologies. (Source: WIM Technologies)

— Paula Gilbert, Editor, Connecting Africa