NBN Co is hoping to set a new record for mmWave distance over its ixed wireless network in the coming months, aiming to hit 14km using the latest software from Er- icsson and a new Qualcomm chipset.

General manager, wireless technologies Sam Stephens noted that because NBN Co used externally mounted CPE for its ixed wireless network, it has been able to stretch mid-band spectrum a lot further than most telcos.

“And for us to leverage millimetre wave, we needed to be able to develop a solution that would give us a similar kind of service range out of the millimetre wave in the gigahertz range — 28 GHz,” he told the third annual Beyond 5G Connectivity Summit, hosted by the Connectivity Innovation Network.

“So we’ve done a lot of work with Ericsson and with our other partners to design antennas and solutions that will make that
work,” offering “potentially multi-gigabit speeds at signiicant ranges — out towards the 10 kilometre mark from towers — which will give us incredible capacity,” Ste- phens told the conference.

“It is still going to be constrained by practical physics,” he noted. “It’s very easily stopped by any kind of obstruction, so there’s some quirks and some challenges to overcome to actually make use of it effectively but we’re excited by the prospect of what that can do.”

“Millimetre wave is typically considered a giant capacity but pretty low-range, small cell concept,” Stephens said. “We had a look at this and thought about how we could use it. The non-Standalone approach allows you to couple it with your 4G layer, so then you can use that for your uplink and for sort of the most reliable portion of communication. Pair it with a millimetre wave band, you can stretch the range.

“You trade off a bit of capacity … but still, because there’s so much bandwidth avail- able in that millimetre wave band, that’s a pretty sensible thing to do. You can take that a step further as you move into the Standalone network and you can re-farm some of that mid-band spectrum to 5G as well, and then you can extend the range fur- ther with yet more capacity trade off. And that’s something we’ve been working on basically since I joined NBN more than six years ago.”

The telco has previously managed to stretch an mmWave connection out to 11km.

Currently NBN Co has a “few thousand actual customers” connected to its mmWave network, he told the conference. “We’ve got 1000 sites deployed and we’re progressively deploying the latest version of our WNTD that delivers that millimetre wave capability,” Stephens said. In order to make it work, accurate geospatial plan- ning is critical, he said.

“And that’s very dificult to do on traditional RF planning tools with 10 metre or 20 metre sort of tile grids of the universe, so we’ve invested heavily in both tooling and in map data to be able to have high-resolution predictions and really try and make sure that we’re able to understand the terrain, the topology.”

“If you’ve got a hedge line or a tree around your property, we need to know that before we suggest to you that you can get a good servicer with this particular technol- ogy,” he said. “And also we need to give the technicians who are doing the install as much information as possible to make sure that they can achieve that successful in- stall and connect as best as possible.

Rohan Pearce