Though some will criticize the changes, a new Federal Communications Commission look at where internet access was in 2018 suggests coverage and speeds available to underserved citizens is improving.
Such changes never will be fast enough to satisfy some, and it might never be possible to completely eliminate the urban-rural difference in number of suppliers, typical speeds or absolute speed. Nor is it possible to dismiss progress.
From December 2016 to December 2018, the number of U.S. residents without any options for at least 250/25 Mbps fixed terrestrial broadband service dropped by 74 percent, from 181.7 million to 47 million, the FCC notes.
The number of residents with no options for at least 25/3 Mbps fixed terrestrial broadband service fell by 30 percent, from 26.1 million to 18.3 million.
The data also showed an increase in competition from December 2016 to December 2018, with the number of residents enjoying more than two options for 25/3 Mbps fixed terrestrial broadband service increasing by 52 percent, from 45.9 million to 69.8 million.
Moreover, the number of rural residents with two or more options for 25/3 Mbps fixed terrestrial broadband service increased by 52 percent, from 14.4 million to 22 million.
New platforms are coming, though, including low earth orbit satellite constellations, fixed wireless, and much more unlicensed and shared spectrum.
The new HAPS Alliance--including SoftBank’s HAPS Mobile, Alphabet's Loon, AeroVironment, Airbus Defence and Space, Bharti Airtel, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Nokia SoftBank and Telefónica--aims to promote the use of high altitude vehicles for internet access.
Considered in light of the emergence of low earth orbit satellite constellations, 5G fixed wireless and use of growing amounts of unlicensed and shared spectrum, HAPs shows growing potential use of wireless access platforms for internet access, especially in areas where traditional platforms cannot generate a reasonable financial return.
Note the involvement of major app developers, mobile service providers, traditional telecom infrastructure providers and aerospace firms. As with the Telecom InfraProject, new and incumbent entities are working together to reduce the costs of communications infrastructure.
Among the immediate activities is “global harmonization of HAPS spectrum, including the adoption, improvement and acceleration of global spectrum standardization for High Altitude IMT Base Stations within the International Telecommunications Union (ITU),” the group says.
Some early indications are that--as always in the past--the usable bandwidth of HAPs will be substantially less than available on terrestrial networks. Some early work by the International Telecommunications Union suggests data rates per user will depend on the number of simultaneous users.
A single HAPs platform might have a total throughput of less than 5 Gbps, supporting 2,000 simultaneous users, or perhaps 30 Gbps supporting 12,800 simultaneous users.
That works out to about 2.38 Mbps per user, when there are 2,000 simultaneous users. HAPs units transmitting over wider areas might only be able to support a couple hundred kilobits per second when 12,800 simultaneous users are active
Some early suggestions for dedicated HAPS bandwidth use the 6.4 GHz to 6.6 GHz band. In the millimeter ranges a few different bands might be used, including 28 GHz, 31 GHz, 47 GHz or 48 GHz.
Some bandwidth always is preferable to no bandwidth, and that is the primary appeal of the emergence untethered access platforms. In perhaps a minority of cases, untethered bandwidth might approach that of cabled network alternatives. That might occur most often when millimeter wave spectrum is used in a small cell deployment to boost capacity in a dense user, urban location.
Most of the time, untethered bandwidth supplied by some wireless platform will provide access where it is not otherwise possible, but also not at speeds that approach cabled network performance.
One way of illustrating the dramatic impact of coming shared spectrum, unlicensed and millimeter wave spectrum is compare those new sources with all existing mobile spectrum.
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