Cost Comparisons of Backhaul Transport Technologies for 5G Fixed Wireless Access

Fixed wireless access (FWA) is an alternate means of providing Internet connectivity that uses radio spectrum rather than fixed lines. 5G will greatly improve FWA performances. There are a few backhaul transport technologies that can support 5G FWA. In this paper, we create models to compare the deployment cost of three typical backhaul transport technologies, namely wireless backhaul, direct fiber and passive optical network (PON). We also compare the deployment cost of FWA to that of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). Various fiber cost scenarios are tested. From the modeling results, we find that wireless backhaul is the most cost-effective among the three backhaul technologies under high fiber costs, while direct fiber is the most cost-effective under low fiber costs. FWA is more cost-effective than FTTH when the fiber cost is above certain value.