HAPS Alliance Illustrates "Some Bandwidth Better than No Bandwidth" Principle

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.

source: ITU

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. 

source: ITU

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.