It might seem counterintuitive, but Midco’s chief technology innovation officer told Fierce the operator’s use of fixed wireless access (FWA) technology to serve certain remote locations is actually benefitting its efforts to expand its fiber network.
Jon Pederson, who has worked for the regional U.S. broadband provider for more than three decades, explained Midco deploys fixed wireless access service for customers in some of the most remote parts of its footprint, for instance to isolated farms and ranches. As it runs fiber to new towers for that service, he said it’s also taking the opportunity to push fiber into nearby communities along the way.
“We are getting to places that didn’t make financial sense before, but if you combine multiple efforts you can build out your network much faster,” he said. Pederson noted there are other advantages to its approach, stating it was able to use a string of wireless towers to add additional redundancy to its fiber backhaul network.
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The comments come as Midco presses on with a $500 million fiber project which aims to deliver multi-gigabit service to 300,000 homes and businesses over the coming years. Pederson said Midco was able to turn up around 12,000 new homes in 2021. He said it’s aiming to increase that figure to between 18,000 and 20,000 this year and ramp further in the following years.
Thus far along the way he said it has encountered some supply chain issues related to CPE, but noted those “didn’t slow us that much because we were able to proceed with construction and we just delayed activation.” The delay only lasted about a month or two, he said.
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Right now, only a single digit percentage of Midco’s more than 400,000 broadband subscribers are on fiber, but “we will increase that progressively over time,” Pederson said.
Cable roadmap
Alongside its fiber work, Pederson said Midco is in the midst of upgrading portions its hybrid-fiber coaxial network to add capacity via node splits and tweaks to its upstream splits. He noted it is laying the groundwork for DOCSIS 4.0, implementing distributed access architecture (DAA) as it changes out equipment for node splits.
“In particular, since we’re kind of rural and have a lot of far flung small communities, we’ve been a Remote PHY champion for years now. And we’re getting a really good benefit from that,” he stated.
Remote PHY is one type of DAA which shifts the physical layer functionality from the headend to the edge of the access network. Pederson explained that Remote PHY removes the need for a building or equipment at remote locations, which helps cut down on truck rolls and generally makes operations more efficient.
“We used to have to jump through a few hoops to get to some of these remote communities and now we don’t, we treat them just like a neighborhood,” he said.
Midco eventually plans to rollout DOCSIS 4.0 across its cable plant, but Pederson said it likely won’t be a first mover.
“We’re watching it closely. Being more of a mid-tier provider we need a deployment that’s a little more packaged,” he concluded. “So, our goal is to be fast followers on DOCSIS 4.0.”