Wireless to the x (WTTx), a wireless home broadband technology also known as fixed wireless access, has been rapidly developing in the mobile market over the past few years.
In 2017, the number of new WTTx users increased by nearly 40% globally. That was nearly as many new WTTx users as the new fiber to the home (FTTH) users for that year (excluding China). Research Company, Ovum predicts that by 2020, WTTx services have the potential to reach almost 350 million homes worldwide and has the most potential to increase fixed broadband market penetration in emerging markets. A
In addition WTTx is expected to be the first commercial 5G use case in the industry. Compared with indoor Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), outdoor CPE features high gains, zero penetration loss and provides superior coverage in remote areas. But currently, many WTTx operators face outdoor CPE installation challenges, such as high costs due to onsite installation.
Huawei has launched the first installation-free outdoor CPE to help operators deploy WTTx quickly
Improved Coverage
Many countries lack adequate LTE coverage in suburban and rural areas. Weak LTE coverage has become the greatest obstacle to delivering a superior user experience, especially in indoor scenarios.
Operators in more and more countries, especially in North America and Europe, have begun to deploy outdoor CPE on a large scale to provide more reliable, fiber-like, high-speed broadband services. At a given location with given network conditions, the user-perceived throughput of an outdoor CPE is much better.
According to Huawei’s field test, compared with two-antennas indoor CPE, download speed improves 106% and distance with cell edge rate can reach to 6 times compared with 2R indoor CPE. Huawei’s experience working in many countries, including Canada, Ireland, and Italy, shows that outdoor CPEs on commercial networks can cover a radius of over 15 km even if working on a frequency band of 3.5 GHz.
Huawei’s latest CPE, the B2368 is flexible and easy to install, minimizing the need for onsite installation by professionals, which is time-consuming and expensive. This outdoor CPE has an innovative, integrated design, with both directional and omnidirectional antennas.
It is the industry’s first outdoor CPE that does not need to be aligned with the base station, which reduces the total installation time by more than 25%. In many cases, users can install this CPE by themselves, significantly lowering the cost of service provisioning and OPEX for operators. CPE B2368 outshone more than 6000 entries from 60 countries and won the Red Dot Award 2018 for Product Design.
The CPE B2368
Higher Data Rates
Wireless technologies have tremendously improved air interface performance over the years. 3G technology achieves a maximum theoretical downlink rate of dozens of Mbit/s and an average user-perceived throughput of several Mbit/s. In today’s 4.5G era, the theoretical rate reaches 1 Gbit/s, and the average user throughput reaches dozens of Mbit/s. 5G will further increase the maximum downlink rate to more than 10 Gbit/s, and the average user-perceived throughput on commercial networks is expected to reach hundreds of Mbit/s. In regions with the highest FTTH penetration rate, such as South Korea and Hong Kong, the average user throughput is just more than 100 Mbit/s.
The B2368 is a Cat 12 CPE featuring industry-leading radio performance and support for concurrency of 4×4 MIMO and 2CC CA which means the highest download speed can reach to 600Mbps. It can achieve a peak downlink rate of 600 Mbit/s.
More Services
From broadband access and voice services to the popular Video On Demand (VOD), online TV, and smart home services, the service demand of household users are growing in an increasing number of countries.
The smart home has become a trending topic in recent years. At MWC 2018, Huawei exhibited an innovative cross-industry product, a smart home gateway that integrates Google Assistant with a CPE. This artificially intelligent CPE supports voice interaction and features advanced network capabilities. It will become a powerful solution for operators to provide new smart home services.
Huawei outdoor CPE also supports IP Pass-through, L2 VPN and L3 VPN tunneling which are suitable for small and medium enterprises (SME) and branches. In Morocco and Kenya the VPN based on outdoor CPE is used in scale for SMEs, and benefit from the enterprises, like bank, school, government, the ARPU is 5 to 10 times of mobile broadband.
Huawei has helped nearly 200 operators worldwide deploy WTTx networks, and Huawei’s outdoor CPEs are used commercially by 120 operators. Huawei’s WTTx solution provides broadband access to an increasing number of users and connects hundreds of millions of households and enterprises, particularly in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Nigeria.
