5G Fixed Wireless Fills the Copper Gap

By: John Shepler

For almost a century and a half, twisted pair copper wiring has been the way telecom services were delivered. This ranges from classic plain old telephone service, to T1 digital lines for Internet access and point to point private connections. Copper, however, is on the way out. If you haven’t run up against its bandwidth limitations yet, you may still have a problem if your local telephone company (who owns all the copper lines) decides to discontinue service. Then what?

What Replaces Copper Lines?
When it comes to bandwidth, fiber optic cables can’t be beat. You can order any bandwidth from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps, and even 100 Gbps in many locations. Hybrid Fiber Cable, commonly known as cable broadband, can now deliver multi-gigabit speeds through the classic coaxial cable.

Sounds great, but what if you are in an area that is not served by Cable and has no fiber infrastructure nearby? Are you simply stuck with no service at all?

5G Wireless To the Rescue
Fifth generation or 5G smartphones have pretty much taken over the market from the 4G LTE standard that served us for years. With 5G comes new bands that offer expanded bandwidth and low latency for smart autonomous devices that are called the Internet of Things.

There is another application that 5G is pursuing aggressively. That is fixed wireless access or FWA. The “fixed” part of FWA means situations that are not mobile. Think of your desktop PC, point of sale terminals, or even your entire Local Area Network.

Internet service providers called WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers have been around to serve homes and businesses that can’t get wired or fiber Internet. They tend to be very local and independent and use systems that are not affiliated with cellular providers. If you have a WISP nearby, they can often step in and give you the service you need to stay online.

How 5G is different than the usual WISP is that it is true cellular broadband and serves both fixed and mobile users. The same broadband that you use on your phone can also be delivered directly to an office, store or residence wherever there is a cell tower nearby.

4G LTE service actually started the push for applications to use cellular broadband rather than depend on DSL, cable or other wired services. When 4G LTE became widely available it offered bandwidths that rivaled typical broadband services and had enough capacity to serve multitudes of customers rather than just a few at a time.

4G LTE is still a good option for many applications. What 5G does is offer bandwidths that can rival fiber at low latencies for sensitive applications. Major cellular carriers are promoting 5G wireless as a competitor to cable broadband in fixed locations. For business users, 5G can often substitute for unavailable T1 lines or even DS3 bandwidth.

How Do You Get 5G FWA?
You may have already paired your phone with your desktop PC or tablet using Bluetooth and setting up the phone as a personal Internet Hotspot. FWA expands upon this idea. Instead of a phone, you install a 5G or combination 5G / 4G LTE Gateway. This can be a simple box that sits on your desk in on a shelf near a window. It may have a wired Ethernet port to connect to your router or may even contain a router and WiFI hotspot. Some of these devices have special antennas that are more efficient in capturing the cellular tower signal for reliable operation.

A good way to research the availability of 5G and 4G LTE options for your business is to work with a bandwidth broker that represents a multitude of companies offering this type of service. You’ll want a solid connection with enough bandwidth to serve the size of your business and sufficient or no data limits. You may be surprised at the variety of offerings available, even in rural or otherwise underserved areas.

20/20 Mbps Speed on Copper and Fiber

By: John Shepler


Business broadband bandwidth requirements have been on a steady slope upward. Some of this is the change from mostly text based information to graphical and video content. More is due to moving business processes from local desktop computers and company servers to cloud providers. Simple T1 lines and other low speed connections are no longer adequate. Entry level WAN (Wide Area Network) speeds, including Internet broadband, are now in the tens of Megabits per second.

A popular service level for smaller businesses and remote workers is 20/20 Mbps. This is fast enough to support a single user, small team or small retail location while still being very affordable. Let’s take a look at the options available.

What is 20/20 Mbps?
The term 20/20 Mbps means 20 Mbps bandwidth in both directions. That’s 20 Mbps upload and 20 Mbps download. When the upload and download speeds are the same, the connection is said to be symmetrical. It makes no difference if you are watching a video clip or backing up files to cloud storage, the bandwidth is the same. In fact, if the connection is full-duplex, as most business grade lines are, you can be downloading and uploading at the same time without slowing down.

Wireline Connections
The 20 Mbps line speed, or bandwidth, is way beyond the capability of a T1 line that runs flat out at 1.5 Mbps. It’s also too much to achieve by bonding multiple T1 lines together. Does that mean that delivery over standard multi-pair telco lines is impossible? Not at all. Newer technology called Ethernet over Copper (EoC) can easily deliver that speed and perhaps even more provided that your business location is close enough to the telephone company office.

Telephone companies own all that twisted pair copper that connects telephone desk sets. The same bundles can carry T1 service and the newer Ethernet over Copper. Regardless of which service provider offers you the EoC service, it will come in on those telco lines. So, the phone company has to have the right termination equipment and you need to be within a couple of miles or so of the office. In populous areas, that’s generally the case.

Fiber Optic Connections
The whole world is converting to fiber at a rapid pace. One of the main drivers is the need for high bandwidth to cellular towers to support 4G and 5G broadband services. The other driver is the ever higher bandwidth requirements of business as cloud services expand.

Fiber is the gold standard of bandwidth connectivity. If you have a fiber optic line installed to your business location, you’ve pretty much future-proofed your business. It’s almost impossible to need more bandwidth than the fiber can support. Even if that happened, there are usually many fiber strands within a fiber optic cable.

Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) is the upgrade to EoC. You can get 20/20 Mbps dedicated, symmetrical bandwidth at a very reasonable price anywhere that fiber is available. Dedicated means that it is for your use only and the line speed doesn’t vary. Both EoF and EoC are dedicated services, although other types of bandwidth might not be.

Another advantage of Ethernet over Fiber is that it is easily scalable. That means that if you get 20/20 Mbps service now and in a few years need to move up to, say 50/50 Mbps because of a growing business, that can be done with a simple phone call to your provider and likely no equipment changes. Some carriers even offer user control panels that let you change bandwidth levels at will.

How about Cable, Satellite and Wireless?
Cable, Satellite and Wireless services have evolved to offer 20/20 Mbps bandwidth and beyond. These services may be less expensive that EoC or EoF, but they are likely to be shared, not dedicated bandwidth and asymmetrical (different upload and download speeds) rather than symmetrical. Satellite and Wireless tend to have some usage limits due to limited resources. In some locations you can get dedicated symmetrical microwave delivery that offers similar performance to EoC or EoF but without the wires.

Are you ready for a bandwidth upgrade but unsure what is the best option for your business? Our knowledgeable consultants can give you good advice and get you the best price on the service you need. Find business bandwidth options over copper, fiber, cable, satellite and wireless now.