U.S. cable service provider Mediacom Communications tapped Cisco-backed Tarana Wireless to provide its fixed-wireless access (FWA) platform to expand the reach of broadband services funded through a government program.

The deal will see Mediacom, which is the nation’s fifth largest cable provider, use Tarana’s “next generation” FWA product across markets in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. This will use a combination of existing fiber and cable broadband assets to power Tarana’s Gigabit 1 (G1) FWA platform.

Those deployments will be backed the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) that provides financial incentives for operators to expand broadband into unserved markets. The program requires broadband services to provide download speeds in excess of 100 Mb/s and upload speeds in excess of 20 Mb/s, which is in line with the FCC’s recently updated minimum benchmark speed for broadband services.

Tarana CEO Basil Alwan told SDxCental last year 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 said that Tarana’s equipment is initially 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 said. “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 late last year scored $50 million in funding from 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 acquired last year. That funding pushed Tarana’s total funding haul to more than $425 million.

Tarana’s technology has been deployed by more than 200 service providers in 21 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 in 2022.

The deal also expands Mediacom’s efforts into the increasingly competitive FWA space.

The communications service provider signed a deal in mid-2022 with Samsung for that vendor to provide 4G LTE and 5G-ready radio access network (RAN) equipment to help expand rural broadband coverage and bridge the digital divide.

Mediacom will use the Samsung RAN equipment for FWA services that will tap the cable company’s Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum holdings. Mediacom spent $29.5 million on 576 CBRS spectrum licenses during the FCC’s Auction 105 in 2020.

Mediacom’s efforts join those of its larger cable brethren that are also tapping into FWA services to expand the reach of their broadband services.

Charter Communications, for instance, recently said that it has thousands of RAN antennas active in a test market focused on providing broadband services to multi-dwelling units (MDUs). That service is using Charter’s deep CBRS spectrum portfolio.