Why Wireless Might be the Best Way to Serve the "Unserved"

A new study produced by the Federal Communications Commission might be interpreted as arguing for a wireless approach to bringing broadband to many unserved locations, said by the FCC to number seven million homes, adequate for service at 4 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream.

The most rural 250,000 housing units account for $13.4 billion of the total $23.5 billion investment required. In fact, as cost varies inversely with density and distance from a central office or cable headend, the cost curve is a reverse Pareto distribution (a reverse "long tail").

The FCC says wireless, such as a fourth-generation wireless network, is the lowest-cost technology in 90 percent of cases. The point is that population density generally is inversely related to access cost.