The WISP Migration to Fiber
While it seems counterintuitive, a significant amount of Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) are making the leap to fiber, replacing existing last-mile technologies in their networks to provide connectivity from core to customer using fiber from end-to-end. It’s a shift that the premiere association for wireless service providers is unafraid to discuss.
“We estimate probably 30% of our members employ fiber to the home in some manner,” said Mike Wendy, Director of Communication for WISPA, the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association. “They all have some fiber exposure anyway because of the nature of the internet, from the [Central Office] or [Point of Presence] to the tower or elevated vertical structure to the radios. That’s always been there and been the basic operating [network structure] for years. But now, more and more are seeing as technology becomes more ubiquitous, cheaper, and more powerful and easier to operate, they are moving into the fiber business where it makes sense.”
Founded in 2004, WISPA defines a WISP on its website as “an internet service provider that utilities wireless, fiber optic, or other technologies to distribute broadband or related Internet Protocol-derived services.” Wendy said the organization has about 750 or so operator members in its ranks and perhaps maybe 1500 true WISPs across the country in total with up to an estimated 10 million people served wireless industry wide.
“WISPs are kind of a moving target,” said Wendy. “I think the ‘W’ could just as well mean ‘wow,’ ‘wonderful,’ or ‘wired.’ It depends on the WISP themselves and the circumstances, maturity, and financial resources each one has. They’ve always been sort of evolutionary and maverick in their nature, using whatever tool they can to connect people. They’re largely in rural, under resourced, and Tribal areas.”
Today’s WISP could use satellites, unlicensed spectrum, different types of licensed spectrum including LTE, cable, and fiber or a mixture of all of those technologies to connect its customers. Wendy said most WISPs on its roster are independent companies with generally fewer than 10 employees with the bulk of its members having under 1,000 subscribers.
“About 50% of our members are under 1,000 subscribers,” said Wendy. “We have a number of very large ones, like Rise Broadband which serves between 200,000 and 250,000 subscribers at the top end of our membership. Dish is a member as well.”
While 30% of WISPA members have deployed fiber-to-the-home, Wendy seemed to be skeptical that percentage would dramatically increase. “You can’t reach every area in America with aerial or conduit,” said Wendy. “If you never had to deal with a cable, it wouldn’t be a bad day. The connectivity that’s deploying now and has evolved over the past 20 years is robust, reliable, and gigabit and higher capable.”
The wireless “bias,” as Wendy described it, will prevail for a number of years, with economics and deployment speed in its favor. “It’s about a tenth of the cost to get to someone via wireless verses wired alternatives,” said Wendy. “It’s the time savings too. We’re looking at a period of weeks to months as opposed to months to years to build wired networks. WISPA providers are businessmen, working with largely private investment to get a good ROI in a way that makes customer happy too.”
On the other hand, more and more WISPA members are running fiber, with one operator in College Station, Texas, spending 50 cents of every dollar on fiber deployment with his customer base evenly split between wireless and fiber. Each operator will make their own decisions as to what last-mile technology they deploy based upon the economics and resources available.
To gain the latest perspective of wireless ISPs deploying fiber, Fiber Forward spoke to Kansas-based KwiKom, a service provider holding membership in both FBA and WISPA. The company started off as a wireless ISP in 2007 and merged with a competitor WISP in 2010. It started deploying fiber in 2016 to meet the growing demand for more bandwidth across its service areas.
“We always believed fixed wireless would probably be a technology deployed around rural areas, but we did recognize very early on that the demand was going to continue to grow in town, and the best technology to [accommodate] it at that time was fiber,” said Zachery Peres, KwiKom’s founder. “It still is. What I like about fiber is its adaptability to evolving and new technology – all from a strand of glass! It doesn’t have the physical limitations present in the technologies of copper and coax plants. This drove us to invest in fiber – a reliable, future-proof solution for our rural markets we were already servicing with fixed wireless. It was a very easy decision for us to make. One that has seemed to be a more difficult one for ILECs and cable companies in the same markets.“.”
Two years ago, KwiKom embraced and extended its future with fiber by merging with WANRack, also a Kansas-based firm, with its strengths in engineering, constructing, and maintaining fiber networks across the country. With the merger came expansion financing from CBRE Investment Management.
KwiKom has deployed around 380 miles of fiber so far this year and expects to pass 40,000 homes by the end of the year. While the company wouldn’t discuss how many customers it has in its fiber markets, it indicated it had “double digit” penetration after launch in all of its markets with continuing uptake over time. “It’s a lot of pent-up demand that we are satisfying,” said Trenton Travis, Marketing Director, KwiKom. “
But fixed wireless has been very good for KwiKom, enabling it to build a customer base and, just as important, building rapport, trust, and a brand that enabled it to deploy and grow its fiber business. “In the fixed wireless space, we became the dominant provider in eastern and central Kansas through Southeast Nebraska, far-Western Missouri,” said Peres.
Before merging with WANRack and gaining access to CBRE capital, KwiKom’s growth was fueled by loyal customers and the revenue they contributed, month after month, year after year. “We wholeheartedly reinvested our fixed wireless success into building out fiber, as well as continuing to upgrade our wireless infrastructure to support people outside of the areas where it wasn’t feasible to build fiber,” said Peres. “We came from a grassroots build-up effort and fixed wireless business and applied that to fiber. We went out and bought our own construction machinery. We built all these networks in-house, underground and aerial. We still have in-state, full-time, in-house [field] crews.”
Among KwiKom’s fiber successes Peres and Travis pointed to was its recently completed build in Cherryville, Kansas. Bringing fiber to Cherryville enabled a programmer from Los Angeles to return there to work from home and tend to an ailing parent. “It was very hard to do [that move] because the lack of technology in Cherryville,” said Travis “Now it’s there, he can still do his job and take care of his family.”