The broadband industry has spent years debating fiber versus fixed wireless as if it were an either/or choice. Fiber advocates point to superior speed and long-term capacity. Fixed wireless advocates point to dramatically lower deployment costs and faster time-to-service. Both sides are right — and both sides are missing the point.
The real question isn't which technology is better. It's which technology is right for a given location, at a given stage of network buildout, at a given cost per passing. Getting that answer right is what separates a financially sustainable community broadband network from one that runs out of money before it reaches the people who need it most.
The Economics of the Hybrid Approach
Fiber-to-the-premises is, in most respects, the gold standard for residential broadband. It delivers gigabit symmetrical speeds today and can be upgraded to 10 Gbps with software changes to active equipment. Once it's in the ground, a fiber network has an operational life measured in decades. It's essentially future-proof.
But fiber is expensive to build. In dense suburban areas, the math works easily — you're running a relatively short strand of cable to serve a lot of homes. In rural areas, the economics become challenging quickly. A county road with ten homes per mile requires the same infrastructure investment as an urban block with a hundred homes, but generates a fraction of the revenue.
Fixed wireless access (FWA), deployed on purpose-built gear like Tarana's G1 platform, changes the equation. A tower site with sector antennas can serve hundreds of homes without trenching a foot of conduit. Deployment timelines measured in weeks rather than months. Capital costs measured in thousands of dollars per location rather than tens of thousands.
"The hybrid approach isn't a compromise — it's a strategy. FWA gets subscribers online and generating revenue immediately. That revenue supports the long-term fiber buildout. By the time fiber reaches a FWA subscriber, they've already been a happy customer for two years."— Pivot-Tech Development, Technology Team
How Tarana G1 Changes the FWA Equation
Not all fixed wireless is created equal. Legacy FWA gear required clear line-of-sight between the tower and the customer premises — a constraint that eliminated large portions of any coverage area due to terrain, trees, and buildings. Performance degraded in rain. Capacity was limited.
Tarana's G1 platform is a fundamentally different product. It uses advanced interference cancellation and multi-path signal processing to deliver reliable high-speed service in non-line-of-sight environments. The practical result is a much larger effective coverage area per tower site and more consistent performance for end users.
Tarana G1 Key Specifications
- ✓Up to 750 Mbps throughput per subscriber link
- ✓Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) capability — no clear path required
- ✓Interference resilience in dense deployment environments
- ✓Rapid deployment — tower sites can be activated in days
- ✓Same price to subscriber as fiber connection
- ✓Designed upgrade path to fiber for FWA subscribers over time
The Deployment Strategy in Practice
In a Pivot-Tech network buildout, FWA and fiber serve distinct but complementary roles:
Fixed Wireless Access
Tower sites activated first to serve the broadest coverage area as quickly as possible. Subscribers get immediate service. Revenue begins flowing. The community starts experiencing the benefits of competitive broadband within weeks of construction starting.
Middle-Mile Fiber
288-count fiber backbone rings are built in parallel with FWA deployment. The backbone serves as the foundation for all last-mile connections — both existing FWA tower sites and future FTTP distribution.
Fiber-to-the-Premises
As network revenues grow and construction crews work systematically through the coverage area, FWA subscribers are progressively upgraded to direct fiber connections. The upgrade is seamless — same pricing, better performance.
Uniform Pricing
FWA and fiber subscribers pay identical rates. There's no "second-class" service tier. This is a deliberate equity decision — communities shouldn't have a fast lane and a slow lane based on where someone's house happens to be.
Why Uniform Pricing Matters
The decision to charge FWA and fiber subscribers identical rates deserves explanation, because it's a meaningful constraint that shapes the entire deployment model.
From a pure revenue standpoint, you could argue for tiered pricing — charge less for FWA to reflect the lower infrastructure cost, charge more for fiber to capture premium value. Many ISPs do exactly this. But the equity implications are significant: in most communities, FWA serves the outlying rural areas while fiber serves the denser, more affluent core. Tiered pricing by technology becomes, in practice, tiered pricing by income and location.
Pivot-Tech's model treats the entire network as a shared asset. The revenue from denser areas subsidizes infrastructure investment in sparser ones. Uniform pricing is the mechanism that makes universal coverage financially viable — and it's the right thing to do.
"Every subscriber pays the same rate regardless of how they're connected. That's not just an equity commitment — it's what makes the financial model work. You can't build a sustainable community network if you're pricing people out of it based on their zip code."— Jim Cannon, CEO, Pivot-Tech Development
Open Access: The Long-Term Play
Pivot-Tech networks are built on open access architecture — meaning the physical infrastructure can support multiple service providers competing for subscribers on the same network. This is another deliberate design decision with long-term community benefits.
Open access means the community isn't locked into a single provider's pricing and service quality forever. As the network matures and ownership transfers to the community after bond retirement, the infrastructure can support a competitive marketplace. Residents benefit from choice. Local businesses can offer connectivity services. The asset becomes more valuable over time, not less.