Bringing Affordable and Fast Fixed Wireless Broadband to Everyone
GTI, Informa and Huawei successfully held the Asia-Pacific WTTx (fixed wireless access) Copiedthe summit with the theme ‘Bring Affordable and Fast Fixed Wireless Broadband to Every Household’. These discussions centered on accelerating the growth of Asia-Pacific household penetration, advancing the affordability of favorable policies and regulations, and gathering more partners to forge an end-to-end industry ecosystem.
At this summit, Huawei together with Asia-Pacific ICT regulators, leading operators and industry organizations launched a joint declaration called ‘Bridge the Digital Divide, Accelerate Broadband to Households’ to endeavor to create a sustainable industry environment for the development of fixed wireless broadband.
The event saw ICT regulators engage in discussion on how fixed wireless broadband can archive the maximum usage for the development of society by policies and regulations including spectrum, tax, land and subsidies.
According to the national broadband targets specified in ITU conference 2018, national broadband penetration will soar from 17% to 50% in the coming 3-5 years. With more diversified mobile applications happening in the home, fixed wireless access will be a crucial ingredient in bringing wide coverage and low cost in providing universal broadband services.
WTTx is a home broadband technology using 4G/4.5G technologies to deliver cost-effective fiber-like wireless broadband access to unconnected households. Low deployment costs and operating expenses are among WTTx’s greatest advantages. Meanwhile, WTTx is making huge progress in terms of speed, and in a number of countries, the results of 4G speed tests are already surpassing those of fixed broadband, with growing numbers every day.
During the summit, Pradeep de Almeida, Dialog Group Chief Technology Officer, shared the successful WTTx practice and business innovations igniting the first market in Sri Lanka. He said, “Current subscriber and data growth demands faster network rollouts and affordable services. We have identified WTTx to be the fastest way to cater to this demand. WTTx is used to rapidly capture the customer demand and provision the services for home broadband. ”
“It allows easy upgrade path to cater to ever increasing throughput and customer demands. We actively embrace new technologies keeping in mind the upgrade path to future proof networks. Currently, Dialog has deployed Carrier aggregation and TDD Massive MIMO technologies to provide WTTx services for varying bandwidth demands and customer densities. Massive MIMO will provide an easy upgrade path to 5G making the investments future proof.”
Tide Xu, Chief Strategy Office of Wireless Product Line, Huawei, said in his opening speech, “Huawei will keep customer-centric, continuous Innovation to provide best experience, cost effective solution for a better connected intelligent Asia-Pacific.”
By 2017, the accumulated WTTx user numbers had reached 50 million globally. With WTTx, wireless broadband connectivity to unconnected households can be achieved 75% cheaper and 90% faster when compared to fixed-line deployments, delivering a return on investment to operators in less than three years.