Fiber to the Light Pole Now is Quite a Rational Distribution Network Strategy

Starry now is selling its 200-Mbps symmetrical internet access service in Boston for $50 a month. That reportedly includes rental of the Starry Point antenna and the Starry Station WiFi hub, both required to receive service. Apparently there are no contract requirements, either.

It is too early to see whether Starry can garner significant market share, or if it can hold onto that share once Verizon’s 5G upgrades start to make their appearance, including a new fixed wireless access service that could offer gigabit access speeds.

Likewise, it remains to be seen if the actual cost of a fixed wireless connection using 28 GHz and 39 GHz assets will actually be “miniscule,” as Verizon executives have suggested.

Key to the economics is a new distribution network Verizon is putting into place in Boston, which conceivably could support installed fiber on a very dense basis for signal trunking. How dense? Not quite “fiber to the light pole,” but something that could be very close to that.

That is important because Verizon already believes it can deliver gigabit speeds at distances of perhaps 1,000 feet or so.

“The architecture that we're building in Boston, and now in other cities around, is a multi-use” fiber-deep design, Verizon says, where “every light post becomes a potential small cell for 5G.”

That same network is designed to have enough fibers to handle enterprise connections, small business and also serve as the small cell foundation for mobile and fixed consumer access.

If Verizon is correct, then the economics of gigabit internet access for consumers will change significantly, not least because the optical fiber distribution cost is partially defrayed by revenues earned by serving enterprise and business customers, as well as the mobile small cell network.

Fiber to every other light pole then becomes quite realistic.

Siklu says that at 60 GHz, 99.9 percent availability can be obtained at a distance of 1.2 km (about 0.7 miles).

Signal propagation at that same level of availability, using 70 GHz or 80 GHz frequencies, is about 1.1 km (about 0.66 miles).

If, as some others expect, millimeter wave small cells have a transmission radius of about 50 meters (165 feet) to 200 meters (perhaps a tenth of a mile), it is easy to predict that an unusually-dense backhaul network will have to be built (by mobile network standards).

Keep in mind that street lights are spaced at distances from 100 feet (30.5 meters) to 400 feet (122 meters) on local roads. So "fiber to the light pole" seems workable as the distirbution network to support an urban small cell network with enough capacity to deliver gigabit internet access to consumer locations.