Contrary to opinions aired in the South African market recently, fibre is not a replacement for fixed-wireless access (FWA) for last-mile connectivity.
This is according to Comsol CEO Iain Stevenson, who notes that vandalism and theft impact the reliability of South Africa’s fibre networks, while ageing infrastructure degrades the quality of service experienced.
He says FWA – specifically licensed FWA designed for business – is a powerful wireless technology that offers a reliable complementary access medium or an alternative to fibre.
Stevenson says there are still misconceptions in the market around the performance of wireless technologies.
“Many organisations dismissing last-mile wireless are basing their opinions on legacy mediums. Wireless technologies have evolved dramatically over the past 10 years. There is also a vast difference between heavily contended LTE and 5G products aimed at the consumer market and FWA products engineered for business.”
He explains that Comsol, the leading provider of wholesale open-access FWA last-mile connectivity and private networks in South Africa, has built its business on advanced networks with connectivity and power redundancy, to support mission-critical business connectivity.
“As the last-mile connectivity specialist for business, we use various technologies to provide reliability and redundancy for our customers. We typically recommend a hybrid approach combining mediums like FWA, fixed-mobile, fibre or satellite to ensure resilience in networks,” Stevenson says.
Stronger, more resilient
“When considering FWA, it is important to understand that licensed FWA services offer stronger, more resilient connections than unlicensed wireless connectivity. The latest evolution of FWA services, licensed FWA, delivers performance on par with that of fibre and, when combined, providing the most resilient solution.
Stevenson says fibre roll-outs can be costly and time-consuming due to wayleave obligations that fibre network operators have to comply with. FWA services are installed in a matter of days and our service offering is a quality product for the business. Our service delivers hundreds of megabits per second, is highly stable and reliable, and latencies are equivalent to fibre, with the added advantage that it is quick and cost effective to deploy. As such, Comsol licensed FWA is ideal as a first-choice connectivity medium for small to mid-sized businesses and is the best redundancy option alongside fibre for large enterprises.”
Learn more at comsol.co.za.
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