Traditional mmWave requires line-of-sight to operate, signals can easily be disrupted by outdoor or in-home obstacles. Nokia’s 360 High Gain technology overcomes this by both amplifying available signals and dynamically finding the strongest connection.
“Making indoor, self-installable mmWave FWA viable in an urban indoor environment is crucial for FWA growth," said Sandy Motley (pictured), president of fixed networks at Nokia.
"The addition of mmWave to the 5G FWA market will deliver the 5 to 10 times more capacity that is needed to support the ever more demanding subscribers and services. I am extremely proud of our Fixed Network team who have notched up yet another technical first”.
FWA broadband devices typically use 4G or 5G mobile signals for high speed home connectivity, with most 5G FWA deployment using low band (sub 2Ghz) or mid band (2-6 Ghz) radio frequencies, but additional spectrum will be needed to support future FWA growth.
As such, operators are now looking to increase speeds by using even more frequencies from the high band spectrum known as mmWave (24GHz to 40GHz). However, higher radio frequencies have propagation challenges as they are more likely to be impeded by physical obstacles.
In response to this, Nokia’s 360 High Gain 5G mmWave technology captures a 360 mmWave fingerprint of the indoor environment, picks up direct and reflected signals from any direction, and adapts to the changing environment, through advanced analytics.
“Fixed Wireless Access is on the rise," said Kyung Mun, principal analyst at Mobile Experts. "It will represent almost $15 billion market cumulatively over the next five years and the mmWave-enabled 5G customer premise equipment will make up 80% by 2026.”
Nokia has validated the 360 High Gain 5G mmWave FWA technology in its research labs with technology trials ongoing in various urban environments.
Full scale deployments will start in 2023 with an initial focus on operators with subscribers in dense urban environments.
