Eventually, U.S. cable operators will want to migrate their mobile subscribers onto owned facilities as much as possible. At low volume, as often is the case, wholesale works. At high volume, owner’s economics tend to emerge.
The question is how infrastructure ownership happens and when it happens.
In the near term, such efforts will continue to rely on ways to support “mobile” traffic from the fixed network, using Wi-Fi, but with the likelihood that Citizens Broadband Radio Service will play a bigger role as well.
Should CBRS licenses be acquired, there remains the issue of use cases, which will dictate how infrastructure gets deployed. Logically, any single cable operator will want to use CBRS radios using the hybrid fiber cable network for fronthaul or backhaul, offloading as much traffic as possible to the HFC network, thereby reducing the cost of wholesale capacity purchases.
Cable operators might logically assume that 95 percent of mobile traffic occurs in and around the local areas where customers live and work. They might reasonably assume that up to 80 percent of traffic happens “indoors” as well. All that plays to indoor Wi-Fi assets and outdoor CBRS assets that could collectively offload most mobile traffic created by their customers.
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