Page 27 - SAMENA ELITE - October-December2025

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Tarana sees more Opportunities Ahead for Urban FWA

Tarana originally made a name for
itself deploying fixed wireless access
(FWA) in the rural U.S. Now, the com-
pany sees potential for the technol-
ogy to reach new heights in more
urban environments.

The company recently launched G2,
the next iteration of its FWA platform
that offers 6.4 Gbps per sector (that
is, the coverage area served by a
base station). The increased capacity
allows operators to deliver fixed wire-
less to approximately 2,000 customers
per tower, a ratio Tarana CEO Basil
Alwan said is ideal for larger ISPs. 5G FWA providers, namely the big 3 1.6 Gbps per link, which Alwan noted
mobile network operators (MNOs), was a step up from G1’s 800 Mbps
Tarana currently has around 300 have gotten further along in urban threshold.
operator customers, ranging from penetration by deploying technolo-
regional providers such as Nextlink gies like millimeter wave and stand- In short, Tarana is aiming to give
and Watch Communications to the alone (SA) 5G. But the problem is operators more options to carry traffic
big names like Cox and USCellular. carriers are running out of spectrum since they won’t always have access
that they can allocate specifically to to the same spectrum across their
“But there’s much bigger companies FWA, Alwan noted. footprints.
that are coming along and G2 is what
they want,” Alwan told Fierce. “They “It’s 30 times more bandwidth inten- “One way to think about it is you’re
want to go after it in the middle of sive to serve a home than it is to serve trying to get from one city to the next,
towns, they want to go after Phoenix… a mobile [device],” he said, citing data you got four highways to do it,” Alwan
we have one company building in San on North American monthly usage said. “Four routes, four different fre-
Jose.” trends from Ericsson and OpenVault. quencies and how fast you can go in
“If you build a mobile network and each route.”
FWA usage in metro areas has been start putting homes on it, it quickly
steadily climbing in the last few consumes all your spectrum and The wireless landscape has become
years. An Opensignal report from bandwidth.” even more complicated now that
June 2024 said FWA providers so far EchoStar is selling off huge chunks
have claimed around 6% of urban Tarana’s spectrum specs of its spectrum to AT&T and SpaceX.
market share, and a study from WIA Tarana’s FWA technology uses a The carve-out has left the industry
estimated FWA has an addressable combination of unlicensed 5GHz and wondering who could grab the rest of
urban market of 14.6 million house- 6GHz spectrum as well as the licensed EchoStar’s leftovers.
holds. Citizen Broadband Radio Services
(CBRS) band. Alwan said another In Alwan’s view, EchoStar’s remaining
But according to Alwan, traditional 5G key upgrade in G2 is that it supports Priority Access Licenses (PALs) within
and Wi-Fi based FWA networks each four-carrier integration across both the CBRS band “are extremely good
have their issues when it comes to licensed and unlicensed spectrum, for our product.” Owners of PALs have
expanding to denser markets. giving operators access to 160MHz higher priority than General Autho-
across multiple bands in a single rized Access (GAA) users, who can
“If you talk to the WISPs that have radio. only tap into CBRS when it’s not being
done the rural wireless with Wi-Fi stuff, used by incumbents and PAL users.
they’ll tell you they never really went He explained Tarana can do that with
into town because they could never its dual-resonant antennas, which “It’s a great opportunity for anyone in
get enough density to justify it,” he are designed to work at two different fixed wireless,” Alwan noted. “Those
said. “If you put up an access point operating frequencies at the same things being up for grabs, or whether
and you have 10 homes on it, those time. “This gives customers the ability Dish decides to do something with
access points start to self-interfere at to have a couple of carriers in CBRS, a them, it’s amazing.”
10, 15, 20 points.” couple of carriers in 6GHz” to deliver
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