Tarana Wireless recently scored $50 million in new funding that the fixed-wireless access (FWA) equipment provider plans to use to expand investments into the reach and ability of its technology, which it claims is superior to traditional FWA deployments touted as growth opportunities for established providers like Verizon and T-Mobile US.

Silicon Valley-based Tarana’s funding was provided by Digital Alpha Advisors, which has a “strategic collaboration agreement” with Cisco and was an investor in cloud-native mobile service platform provider Working Group Two that Cisco recently acquired. Digital Alpha Advisors’ $50 million investment into Tarana, which fattens the vendor’s total funding haul to more than $425 million, also includes a revenue-share financing option for Tarana customers to help fund FWA deployments using the vendor’s Gigabit 1 (G1) technology.

Tarana CEO Basil Alwan explained that the G1 technology is the vendor’s secret sauce that allows it to outperform traditional FWA equipment. This is based on its ability to support high network speeds without the need for line-of-sight, and its ability to tap into unlicensed spectrum to support quality connections.

Alwan explained that Tarana’s equipment is currently focused on supporting so-called mid-band spectrum between 2 GHz and 7 GHz. These bands are ripe for FWA service as they toe the line between coverage and capacity.

“That's where you get the nice combination of non-line-of-sight potential but also very high speeds,” Alwan said.

That technology is built into a receiving unit that houses 2.6-teraflops of digital signal processing power that can absorb incoming signals regardless of their direction or strength.

“Basically we take all of those signals – not just one – because we have a big antenna, spatially understand where they're coming from, bring them into the digital main separately, shift them in time and phase and add them back together,” Alwan explained. “We can create a five-bar signal out of a one bar signal or a bunch of one bar signals at that location. We get much higher modulations at the cell edge, so we solve the cell edge problem, which is a massive problem for mobile.”

Tarana also uses its advanced antenna and digital signal processing capabilities to cancel out interference in unlicensed spectrum bands to produce a consistent high-speed service.

“If there's a cell tower five miles away and there's a bunch of Wi-Fi interference right next to you, in the same time, in exactly the same place, we can actually silence it with a null pattern on the antenna and we can make it so we can basically take unlicensed spectrum and make it usable and make it reliable, which is really key,” Alwan said.

The G1 platform also supports licensed spectrum, including Consumer Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) spectrum. The platform currently supports speeds up to 800 Mb/s per link, which can be split between upline and downlink, and has plans to increase that potential to 1.6 Gb/s.

Tarana’s technology has been deployed by more than 270 service providers in 19 countries. This includes domestic deployments in 41 states with service providers like Wisper Internet, Resound Networks and Nextlink Internet.

The company noted these deployments generated nearly $100 million in revenue last year. Alwan added that the vendor is also looking to help telecom operators deploy broadband services tied to the recently implemented $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Alwan said Tarana’s embedded technology supports more users with higher network speeds compared with the traditional network architectures and equipment being used by larger operators. These traditional deployments are basically selling excess mobile capacity, which Alwan said becomes tricky when the typical FWA connection is using a lot more data per month compared to higher-paying mobile handset customers.

“If the mobile network needs any bits, they're going to go to the mobile service, it's gonna be a strict priorities situation and they're going to sell excess capacity on their on the network,” Alwan said. “That's exactly what they're doing right now. That's why they limit the number of [FWA] subscribers that can come on to the network because they're only selling excess capacity. If there's no more excess capacity they have to do a really interesting planning exercises, like what is the trajectory of the mobile network, because it's growing every year. And how many subs can I put on that that are eating up 30 to 50 times each mobile [connection] before I have to stop to make sure I make room to sell because they can't afford for the mobile service to be compromised. What this does is it creates a lot of tension between the services.”

This excess-capacity model is indeed playing out in the market.

T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert has stated the carrier can support up to 8 million 5G-powered FWA customers “based on the excess capacity profile of our built mobile network.”

“That means it’s not capital burdened,” Sievert said. “And because of that, we can make profit there. And so it plays a role. It’s a single-digit penetration role, and we’re on our way to going and seizing it for the benefit of our shareholders and our customers.”

Sievert said that T-Mobile has extra capacity on its 5G network to support FWA services covering about 50 million addresses. This is based on the carrier’s internally network capacity modeling.

“They’re geographically dispersed all over the U.S. because the way our model works is we’re selling excess capacity sector by sector,” Sievert said. “What we do is study every sector from every tower in our network and determine what amount of normative smartphone usage will there be over the next several years. And in areas where there’s still excess capacity, we today approve applicants for home internet use.”

However, the dynamic nature of this model means that an address that is “approved” for FWA service one day might have a neighboring address denied service the next day. This model limits ultimate growth to single-digit penetration in those markets but limits the carrier’s financial exposure.

ABI Research predicts robust 5G-based FWA connection growth but added that operators need to use technology advances to manage network quality.

“[Mobile network operators] should launch 5G FWA to utilize their network capacity to make additional revenue,” Fei Liu, 5G and mobile network infrastructure industry analyst at ABI Research, wrote in the report. “However, they need to be vigilant on how many FWA subscribers they can support and which type of service they wish to offer (best effort or QoS). In the long term, MNOs need to apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning (ML) to evaluate their network resource, network capacity, and spectrum to ensure a steady 5G FWA growth.”

Or, in Tarana’s case, better technology.

“The spectrum crunch is coming and we can help with that,” Alwan said. “We can do some things that other people can't do, 5G for instance. We can take unlicensed spectrum … and we can make that usable. The company has a really interesting mix of customers in the pipeline and an interesting mix of customers large and small that are deploying right now.”