[NNagain] On "Throttling" behaviors

Fri Oct 6 11:56:28 EDT 2023

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From: Dave Cohen [mailto:craetdave at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 5, 2023 3:54 PM
To: dickroy at alum.mit.edu; Network Neutrality is back! Let´s make the technical aspects heard this time!
Cc: Livingood, Jason
Subject: Re: [NNagain] On "Throttling" behaviors

I admittedly know little about the service from the radio out in FWA deployments like this but have done a lot of work in the aggregation and backhaul arenas in both environments. The advantage the FWA folks have is that it is significantly more financially viable to not oversubscribe (or oversubscribe less) when you deliver more users from a more centralized next hop location. In other words, it’s easier and cheaper to have 100 Gbps serving 1000 users from a single location than it is to have 1 Gbps serving 10 users from 100 different locations. Which is not to say that there aren’t other challenges in FWA environments relative to FTTx environments, but system capacity (you can always add more radios, with enough available spectrum, at least) isn’t one of them.

[RR] Well, yes and no.  Turns out this is a convex optimization problem (or at least can be converted in to one) that involves things like amount of spectrum, density of let’s call them access points (or APs), the capabilities of each AP in terms of tx power, number of antennas, how sophisticated the signal processing is that can be supported in those APs, and a few other things like adjacent channels and their pollution and constraints placed on the APs because they are secondary users of the band …

OK, with that as background  the question becomes at it’s simplest (leaving out for the moment things like OPEX, property leases, etc.):

“How many customers can I serve with X amount of infrastructure investment and Y amount of spectrum available to me (purchased or otherwise).  I am somewhat suspicious, though I have not done the analysis yet which is why I asked the question actually, that to use your example, supplying 100Gbps aggregate service to 1000 customers using FWA is not within the feasible region of the optimization space and therefore something has to give! :-) :-) :-)  FTR, FWA has been around for 3 decades or more (the company I started was selling such units in the mid-90’s, albeit largely for voice services since that what was wanted back then).  The systems that are still operational (and that’s a large number of them) have been upgraded to offer data services, however the number of subscribers needs to be capped well below that which ISPs using other newer technologies can support.  This is why I am interested to find out what the “state-of-ply” is today! :-) :-)

Cheers,

RR

Dave Cohen

craetdave at gmail.com

On Oct 5, 2023, at 6:17 PM, Dick Roy via Nnagain <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

Has anyone done an analysis of the capacity of FWA systems (in bits/sec/Hz/km^3)????  I am suspicious that the capacity falls way short of that which cable guys have at their disposal, and that as the FWA networks get loaded, performance is going to degrade dramatically ultimately resulting in churn back to the cable guys.  It's very expensive to compete with already sunk FTTH or even FTTC.  

RR

-----Original Message-----
From: Nnagain [mailto:nnagain-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net] On Behalf Of Livingood, Jason via Nnagain
Sent: Thursday, October 5, 2023 1:25 PM
To: Network Neutrality is back! Let´s make the technical aspects heard this time!
Cc: Livingood, Jason
Subject: Re: [NNagain] On "Throttling" behaviors

> On 10/4/23, 13:45, "Nnagain on behalf of David Lang via Nnagain" <nnagain-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:nnagain-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net>> wrote:

> It's an unfortunate fact of reality that the enviornment in the US is one where 

there is very little competition in the ISP space 

The SEC 10-K filings of ISPs no longer support that. Most wireline ISPs are losing subscribers (at material levels) to one of the three new national 5G FWA ISPs (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T). In addition, we will in a few years see the effects of $45B+ of grant money dedicated to underwrite new broadband access network construction - that is also pretty material. 

Per https://telecoms.com/523519/growth-in-5g-fwa-kit-matches-operator-hype/

- " 5G FWA customer premises equipment shipments more than doubled to 7.4 million last year and should reach 13.8 million – that’s 86% growth – this year "

- " The GSA survey shows overall FWA CPE shipments of 25.5 million units last year, "

- " Statistics shared by Leichtman Research Group recently showed that T-Mobile and Verizon together recorded the best part of 900,000 5G FWA net adds in the second quarter of this year, significantly more than the virtually flat cable segment and ahead of the wireline broadband market, which lost almost 62,000 customers in the three months. "

JL

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