Adrian Potter, our Vice President of Special Projects, is also an excellent and vibrant writer. He’s penned a piece encouraging entrepreneurs and smart businesses to take advantage of low CAPEX costs to set up Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and mobile networks in remote regions. Here are some highlights from his piece below:

Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and mobile networks are no longer the sole domain of the big end of town.

With everyone so focused on the main population centres and suffering from an ARPU race to the bottom, resulting in a bottom line bloodbath, only a few are looking to the more remote and rural locations. Most believe these locations are too remote or too difficult to be profitable. Current mainstream thinking is that these rural and remote areas should be left to governments for subsidies from tax payers or universal service obligations on the major telcos.

When my father moved our family to the Pacific Islands in the late 1970s, I remember him saying, “son, there’s always opportunity for smart men on the frontier”. This is never truer than it is today.

Remote connectivity for 4G base stations is simple and cheap now

Forget expensive fixed digital microwave links on distant mountain tops, often with single points of failure. The new breed of High Throughput Satellites (HTS) using Ku and Ka Band are making connectivity to these far-flung locations easier and cheaper. Prices are already significantly under USD$300 Mbps a month for true broadband speeds into inexpensive fixed antennas of 1.2m or less. Forget the nonsense about LEO and MEO vs GEO latency. This is a marketing myth and sales tactic used by those operators seeking an advantage where one does not exist. In all but two very unique use cases, such as high frequency share trading, latency is completely irrelevant to the end user experience. Web browsing, VoIP, video streaming, Skype, Facetime etc. or almost 99.99% of the internet has no issues with GEO latency, FACT.

Adrian’s right, it is an interesting time to be operating in telecommunications and internet services, especially in the fast-developing regions of Asia and the Pacific. There’s an incredible demand from populations all over the fast-growing APAC region. There are untapped markets that can be reached effectively by the right operators with very low risk. Which is why we offer our partners simple, affordable infrastructure and fair wholesale prices.

You can read the full article on Adrian’s Linked In here