“FWA will spearhead 5G monetisation”: Interview with HFCL’s Manish Gangey

5G fixed wireless access (FWA) is taking centre stage as the first real use case of 5G. In an interview with tele.net, Manish Gangey, executive president, product line management, HFCL Limited, talks about the monetisation opportunities for 5G FWA services, the major challenges and key company offerings…

How is 5G FWA customer premises equipment (CPE) enabling telcos and enterprises to unlock the potential of broadband connectivity? How can FWA help telcos in enhancing their ARPUs?

5G as a standard has been in existence for about four years. It has ten times the potential as compared to 4G and, from the telco perspective, if there is one service that is essential for 5G monetisation, it is FWA.

Broadband was traditionally offered using fibre or copper wires, and the pace of deploying any wireline network was extremely slow. All operators in India, except Vodafone Idea, are offering fixed line services along with wireless mobility services. Therefore, for them, FWA is an additional tool to offer broadband services at a faster pace. It is the most promising 5G service through which telcos can make money and start recouping the billions of dollars of investments that they have made in 5G.

What are the unique features of HFCL’s 5G FWA CPE and the recently introduced four new variants of 5G FWA CPE products?

HFCL’s 5G FWA CPE portfolio of products are compliant with the latest 3GPP releases, ensuring they meet the highest global standards. One of the key differentiators is the superior serviceability that we offer to significantly enhance the quality of customer experience. FWA devices also need to have capabilities that allow remote troubleshooting, assess customers’ experience in a deterministic manner and accordingly fix it. HFCL has built these capabilities into its indoor and outdoor variants of 5G FWA CPE, which allows service providers to offer FWA services at considerably lower operational costs.

Moreover, HFCL is the only original equipment manufacturer (OEM) from India that has indigenously designed and developed 5G FWA CPE products that cater to both, millimetre wave and mid-band spectrum. Our robust R&D capabilities also allow us to customise these products to meet specific customer requirements and cater to the spectrum combination needs of global telcos.

What are the advantages and challenges associated with developing indigenous 5G FWA solutions? How is HFCL’s FWA CPE gear tailored to address the needs of the Indian market and key global markets like Europe, North America and Africa?

Firstly, market entry is extremely difficult for new players because the ecosystem is structured in a way that one cannot build products without obtaining certain stringent licences that are also expensive. This not only creates a barrier to promote innovative solutions but also adds to the cost of products. Further, there is a need to expand and enhance the component ecosystem in India to allow end-to-end product development. Establishing a local chipset ecosystem would significantly reduce global dependence and accelerate the product development process.

Additionally, we need to cultivate specialised expertise in wireless hardware technology, radio frequency and antenna design, as well as embedded software development. These skills need to be integrated into educational curriculums to meet industry demand effectively.

 Despite these challenges, HFCL is favourably positioned as the only non-Chinese ecosystem player that can conceive, design, build and deliver end-to-end telecom equipment. Our successful deployments in India demonstrate our domestic expertise and also serve as a testament to our capabilities in addressing global demand. Our diverse portfolio of products extends beyond the FWA market into other domains of wireline and wireless networking, and we are actively pursuing opportunities to expand our international presence in geographies such as the UK, Europe and North America.

“FWA is an additional tool to offer broadband services at a faster pace. It is the most promising 5G service through which telcos can make money and start recouping the billions of dollars of investments that they have made in 5G.”

What strategies should telcos adopt to maximise their earnings from 5G FWA services? How is HFCL positioned to support them in achieving these goals?

Telcos in India are deploying FWA service using an outdoor CPE placed on building rooftops and often shared among multiple customers to reduce deployment and service costs. This shared infrastructure model is an innovative and cost-effective way of FWA deployment and telcos in other geographies with similar population concentration and building infrastructure can adopt this approach to optimise their investments. However, this deployment method is relatively slow. An alternative strategy could be to deploy indoor CPEs, which is prevalent in developed markets.

A key advantage of indoor CPEs is that they can be deployed by customers themselves, thus significantly reducing the need for a large field force. With superior signal reception and better antenna gain capabilities, these indoor CPEs also effectively penetrate concrete walls. Indoor CPEs can serve as an effective complementary strategy for telecom operators to rapidly acquire and service their customers. This velocity and convenience can also be leveraged to subsequently migrate these customers to fibre or cable connections.

However, like any other technology, FWA is a limited-time opportunity and, over time, the spectrum bands will become constrained with the growing 5G mobile subscriber base. FWA customers will thus have to be migrated to cables to free up and preserve spectrum. Therefore, the velocity of customer acquisition should be a key priority for telcos, and deploying indoor CPEs as a complementary strategy to their primary outdoor CPE roll-outs can be instrumental in achieving this goal.

At HFCL, we have built both outdoor and indoor versions of FWA CPEs with distinctive capabilities to overcome signal propagation challenges through concrete walls. Additionally, our indoor CPEs are user friendly for self-installation, enabling telcos to minimise their field resource requirements.

What additional avenues do you anticipate for monetising 5G technology in the future?

The key use cases of 5G are low latency, massive machine-to-machine type communications and enhanced mobile broadband. Out of these, the low latency and massive internet of things (IoT) connectivity features are yet to be tapped in India for enterprise or private 5G use cases. Some countries such as Germany, China and South Korea are already witnessing significant traction in private 5G deployments across various sectors. However, in India, we do not have a dedicated spectrum allocation for private 5G deployments. At present, spectrum is allocated through auctions, and is typically bought by telecom operators at substantial costs, making it economically unviable
for enterprises to deploy their own private 5G networks.

To unlock the full potential of private 5G, a balanced approach is needed to make spectrum accessible to enterprises at reasonable costs without compromising the interests of telecom operators. The government, regulators, enterprises, telcos and other stakeholders need to come together to find a common ground that allows these services to pick up. From the telcos’ perspective, private 5G services are extremely important for monetisation opportunities from these services. And for other players in the ecosystem, it will kick-start a whole lot of activities in terms of building new applications, deploying them and maintaining them through a vibrant ecosystem of innovative companies.

“Indoor CPEs can serve as an effective complementary strategy for telecom operators to rapidly acquire and service their customers. This velocity and convenience can also be leveraged to subsequently migrate these customers to fibre or cable connections.”