ACCEPTED FROM OPEN CALL

Can 5G Fixed Broadband Bridge

the Rural Digital Divide?
Andrew Lappalainen and Catherine Rosenberg

Abstract network infrastructure was often out-of-date and

The digital divide between rural and urban under-provisioned, which led to degraded QoE
communities is a significant problem in today’s compared to urban communities and limited the
connected world. Until recently, infrastructure extent to which rural homes and businesses could
costs have limited how effectively fixed broad- participate in the online ecosystem.
band (FB) Internet services could be offered to However, mobile network operators (MNOs)
rural regions. However, with 4G, a convergence have made significant investments in rural commu-
between FB and mobile services has started to nities in Canada and the United States, and today,
emerge via fixed wireless access (FWA), which over 95 percent of rural households in these coun-
has made it possible for operators to provide (lim- tries have 4G mobile coverage or better [1, 2].
ited) FB to rural communities using existing cellu- Thus, the mobile broadband divide between urban
lar infrastructure. To bridge the digital divide, rural and rural communities is significantly smaller than
FWA must be able to provide an end-to-end expe- the FB divide. Hence, it made sense to consider
rience comparable to urban FB. In this regard, 4G cellular — via fixed wireless access (FWA) — as an
is inadequate, but 5G can make a difference. In option to offer FB to rural homes. This makes the
this article we examine how 5G FWA could truly cellular infrastructure “multi-service” (i.e., offering
enable FB in rural regions. We present improve- mobile and FB), which creates a host of new chal-
ments to each area of the 5G architecture, lenges and opportunities.
including new and upcoming advances in 3GPP FB services differ from the services typically
Releases 16 and 17, and examine how they can offered in mobile networks. In particular, IPTV is
benefit rural FWA users. Despite these advances, often a major component of FB, and since screens
5G operators will face a number of challenges used for video streaming are much larger at home,
in planning and operating rural FWA networks. the data rate requirements are high. In addition,
Hence, the second objective of this article is to small businesses (and possibly homes) might host
outline future research directions in this context. servers, putting more pressure on the UL. As
already discussed, to support FB, FWA needs to
Introduction offer acceptable MBRs to each subscribing home
Despite many technological advances in Inter- on both the DL and the UL. This type of require-
net connectivity in recent decades, the at-home ment is new for cellular. Simply put, to offer FB in
Internet experience in rural communities contin- rural areas, MNOs must offer more than coverage:
ues to lag behind urban communities, creating it is critical that they provide capacity as well.
a digital divide between the two regions. 1 Not- Despite its success as a mobile service, 4G is
ing that it might never be possible to fully bridge ill-equipped to meet the FB MBR requirements
this divide (the experience of urban households at rural households since it is limited in terms of
keeps on improving, making it a moving target available bands and its multiple-input multiple-out-
for rural households), many governments have put (MIMO) and beamforming capabilities. Thus,
established universal expectations for fixed broad- despite the fact that 4G service is nearly omnipres-
band (FB) services defined by certain minimum ent in rural communities, 4G FWA has been unable
bit rate (MBR) requirements [1, 2] — for example, to have a significant impact on rural FB. 5G might
50 Mb/s on the downlink (DL) and 10 Mb/s on be revolutionary in this regard, however. Indeed,
the uplink (UL) — which relate directly to the qual- 5G brings advances to the access, backhaul, and
ity of experience (QoE). However, these expecta- network edge that will make it a viable technolo-
tions are rarely met in rural areas. For example, in gy for fixed, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT)
Canada and the United States, the availability of applications in the rural context; so much so that it
a high data rate FB service received by users at is anticipated that MNOs could dominate the rural
home is sharply divided between urban and rural Internet market in the future. One objective of this 1 We note that although the
areas, as shown in Table 1 for the DL. Until now, article is to present 5G FWA and outline new and distinction between “rural”
existing technologies have been unable to narrow upcoming features of 5G from 3rd Generation and “urban” is somewhat
that disparity, but 5G could be the turning point. Partnership Project (3GPP) Releases 16 and 17 subjective, rural can general-
Traditionally, rural FB was mostly offered via a that will benefit the delivery of FB in rural areas, ly be understood to apply to
regions with population densi-
wired infrastructure (e.g., DSL, cable, fiber) that focusing on each area of the network architecture. ties less than several hundred
was expensive to build and operate over large 5G FWA will enable users to combine their ser- people per square kilometer.
areas with a small number of users. Hence, rural vices and subscriptions in new ways (e.g., by bun-
Digital Object Identifier:
The authors are with the University of Waterloo, Canada. 10.1109/MCOMSTD.0001.2100092

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 Urban areas Rural areas to offer diverse types of services with different
requirements, including mobile and FB services
Canada (% of households) [1] 97.4 65.4 requiring enhanced data rates, energy-efficient
USA (% of census blocks) [2] 98.4 74.9 IoT, and ultra-reliable low-latency communications
(URLLC) for vehicular or industrial applications.
Table 1. Availability of 50 Mb/s DL data rates in Canada and the United States. To enable these services, with 5G, 3GPP brings
improvements to every area of the network archi-
tecture illustrated in Fig. 2, including the radio
5G RAN
access network (RAN), the 5G core network
(5GC), which provides end user functionality for
mobility, billing, and other services and which is
a gateway to external networks, the backhaul,
which interconnects the RAN and 5GC, and the
so-called network edge, which enables data, appli-
5G FWA
cations, and other specialized network functions
antenna
closer to end users, somewhere between the
5GC and RAN, in order to improve QoE.
The shift toward FB services with minimum rate
Broadband Internet requirements through FWA will require 5G MNOs
to provide a well-managed, end-to-end service.
Hence, the advances in each area of the network
IPTV will be critical to making 5G FWA a success, espe-
Modem with
5G SIM card cially in rural regions where the path from a home
to the gateway might incorporate many backhaul
hops. We now describe these improvements and
Figure 1. Rural fixed wireless access. A home with a 5G FWA subscription how they will help make rural 5G FWA a success.
enables users to access multiple types of services (e.g., home broadband
and IPTV) through a single modem. Access
Advances in (multi-user) MIMO and beamforming
technologies, the 5G new radio (NR) air inter-
face [3], and the availability of new wireless bands
make it possible to offer significantly higher data
Internet rates to a significantly higher number of users per
Network Edge cell than 4G.
Core Network
Multi-user massive MIMO (MU-MIMO) has
Backhaul
the potential to provide a 10-fold increase in sys-
RAN
tem capacity over single-user MIMO used in 4G
by increasing the number of antennas at the BSs
and enabling transmission to/from multiple users
Figure 2. 5G architecture, including the radio access network (RAN), in the same resource block [4]. This multi-user
backhaul, network edge, and core network. transmission is enabled by the combined gains
from spatial multiplexing, improved signal ener-
dling mobile plans together with home services). gy from antenna beamforming, and reduced
Hence, 5G FWA will not only improve the rural interference due to precoding at the transmitters
QoE, but is also likely to provide rural users with and combining at the receivers. Together, these
better contracts and service options. The second benefits give rise to a much higher signal-to-inter-
goal of this article is to highlight the open challeng- ference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and hence better
es and questions MNOs would face in planning rates, particularly for cell edge users. This is essen-
and operating a rural converged 5G network. tial in the rural context since capacity and coverage
To set the stage for the remainder of the arti- are both needed. MU-MIMO is especially well suit-
cle, please refer to Fig. 1. Rural 5G FWA requires ed for rural FWA given that homes are non-mobile
homes or businesses to be equipped with roof and likely to be well separated from one another,
mounted, high gain antennas. The MNO assists providing an ideal beamforming environment [5].
with the installation to achieve line of sight to the As discussed later, these benefits introduce addi-
best base station (BS). Connected to each antenna tional complexity to network planning and opera-
is a modem with a 5G SIM card, which provides tion, which would need to be properly managed.
5G-based FB services to users within the premises. In Release 16, codebook improvements have dou-
bled the possible number of streams for MU-MI-
5G and How It Can Improve MO users (from 2 to 4), while also reducing the
channel state information (CSI) overhead. Release
the Rural Fixed Broadband 17 further reduces the MU-MIMO overhead
Experience through improved channel estimation techniques;
it also proposes new techniques to improve UL
5G builds upon decades of past work on earli- MIMO capacity and coverage.
er generations of cellular communications and The 5G NR interface is designed to be flexible
brings vast improvements to data rates, latency, and efficient to meet varying network environ-
mobility management, and energy efficiency. At ments and diverse service requirements of users.
the same time, 5G revolutionizes cellular technol- To this end, 5G NR enables operators to config-
ogy in that it no longer targets personal mobile ure different channel frame structures depending
communications only. Indeed, 5G is intended on the need [3]. The NR radio frame supports

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various subcarrier bandwidths, giving rise to dif-
ferent orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing Out-of-band IAB
In-band IAB
Out-of-band IAB
In-band IAB MWP2P

(OFDM) symbol durations. This enables short-

er time slot durations, which will enable shorter
transmission time intervals and hence lower-laten-
cy transmissions. This flexibility is also necessary
for 5G to support mid-bands and new millime-
ter-wave (mmWave) bands, which have very dif-
ferent Doppler characteristics. NR time-division
duplex (TDD) will allow for flexible UL and DL Figure 3. Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) makes use of NR access
resource configurations. This might be very useful technology to provide backhaul connections between neighboring BSs.
in scenarios where the UL needs more resources In-band IAB shares its spectrum with the RAN. Out-of-band IAB uses
such as for FB services. dedicated spectrum. IAB bands and technology differ from those used for
An abundance of new spectrum is made MWP2P.
available for 5G. Most notable are the mmWave
bands, whose large bandwidth creates the poten-
tial for high capacity. However, coverage is at a asymmetric nature of most Internet traffic, having
disadvantage with mmWave, given its propaga- a TDD-based backhaul that allows a greater share
tion characteristics. The capacity-coverage trade- of resources to be occupied by the DL could be
off of mmWave is unclear, and hence so is the advantageous in comparison to MWP2P, which
benefit of mmWave for rural FB. Nonetheless, utilizes frequency-division duplex (FDD) channels
new sub-6 GHz TDD bands (i.e., mid-bands) have with symmetric DL/UL bandwidths.
also been made available. Mid-bands were pre- IAB has two modes: in-band and out-of-band.
viously considered unsuitable for mobile com- In-band IAB uses bands that are shared with user
munications in rural regions because of their access. Hence, it treats a connected BS like any
poor characteristics. However, these bands might other user equipment on the DL, meaning the BS
be useful for FB since FWA homes will have must be scheduled alongside users. In Release 16,
roof-mounted, high gain, and high transmit power in-band IAB nodes cannot transmit to users while
antennas that can handle them more effective- receiving data from another IAB node (i.e., oper-
ly than mobile devices. Beginning with Release ation is half-duplex); however, duplexing enhance-
16, access to unlicensed spectrum is also made ments are included in Release 17. Out-of-band
possible [6]. Although proper interference coor- IAB uses dedicated bands for backhauling. In the
dination is required for unlicensed access, it is rural context, MNOs might find out-of-band IAB
anticipated that this coordination will be easier to be a way to put currently unused spectrum to
to manage in sparse regions with fewer interfer- good use. The two IAB modes are depicted in Fig.
ence sources; hence, unlicensed spectrum could 3. Release 17 also introduces the ability for IAB
be highly beneficial in rural regions. Aside from BSs to dynamically adjust their backhaul topolo-
newly available spectrum, MNOs might also have gies with one another, thereby improving robust-
access to the portion of their regular bands that ness in the network.
they are not using in rural regions. Typically, this
has been because the extra capacity was not Network Edge and Core Network
needed in these regions for mobile services. In To improve connection robustness and latency,
this case, the bands can be readily deployed to and hence perceived QoE, MNOs need to be
add capacity to rural sites for FWA. able to move control plane functionality as well as
user content (via caching) closer to the network
Backhaul edge. This would also reduce the traffic on the
The backhaul has a direct impact on the QoE backhaul, an added benefit.
given to end users. In fact, unless the capacity of This requirement to do things locally is not new
the backhaul is scaled up to accommodate the to 5G, nor is it unique to the rural context; how-
RAN, efforts spent increasing capacity in the RAN ever, the virtualization, through network function
with massive MU-MIMO, 5G NR, and new bands virtualization (NFV), of the 5GC makes it easier
will be wasted. In rural areas, backhaul has usually to distribute functionality closer to the network
been provided using microwave point-to-point edge than before and makes it possible to do so at
(MWP2P) technology [7], which is a cost-effective lower cost and in a scalable manner [9]. Similarly,
solution for providing low-to-mid data rates over multi-access edge computing (MEC) will enable
long-distance hops. To increase the capacity of operators to cache user content closer to rural sites
the backhaul, similar approaches (e.g., MIMO, and move application servers to the network edge,
new bands) as those presented above for the improving responsiveness and download times
RAN can be used. for FB and mobile users as well as reducing traffic
Beginning with Release 16, it is possible to and signaling loads on the backhaul [10]. This will
establish backhaul connections between neighbor- require cooperation on the part of content pro-
ing BSs using the same antennas, bands, and radio viders and application developers, who might be
protocols that are used to provide user access in motivated to help in this way out of recognition of
the RAN. In other words, BSs can connect with the benefit to end users. Nevertheless, some par-
each other using 5G NR as opposed to MWP2P ties might be unwilling to help out of good will, in
or fiber backhaul technology. This new function- which case the involvement of regulators might be
ality is called integrated access and backhaul necessary [11]. When determining where to distrib-
(IAB) [6, 8], and it might be very useful in rural ute functionality, MNOs must balance costs against
areas. IAB is designed to use TDD spectrum in QoE. For example, assuming that the backhaul fol-
both sub-6 GHz and mmWave bands. Given the lows some type of tree topology, it would be very

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 costly to place functions at every leaf node even rural areas, it might be necessary to address the
Until now, the backhaul though it could provide the highest QoE. question of where and how to add BSs to accept
has been dimensioned more FB subscribers.
for mobile users, which Open Challenges to Improving Another open issue is related to the sharing of
bands between mobile services and FB services.
have no MBR expectation. Rural Fixed Broadband Using 5G Is there an advantage to segregating the services
However, FWA services will To enable 5G FWA in rural areas, a number of (possibly through network slicing), or is it better
open challenges remain to be solved, which we to keep services together for better statistical mul-
require MNOs to make sig- now discuss. tiplexing? This is very much related to how the
nificant upgrades to their network will be operated.
Network Planning and If a network is properly dimensioned, an oper-
backhaul.
Operation for 5G FWA ator should in theory be able to fulfill SLAs for
The focus on providing home-oriented services, every home, irrespective of how many homes
such as broadband Internet and IPTV, for FWA are active. On one hand, when few homes are
users will require MNOs to plan and operate their active, it might be easy to offer the homes their
networks differently than in the past when ser- MBRs, in which case the next objective is to offer
vices were oriented around mobile users. extra rates with the surplus resources in a fair fash-
It is expected that service level agreements ion. On the other hand, to give every home the
(SLAs) between MNOs and their subscribers will MBR when many homes are active would require
establish different commitments for different ser- a well-designed scheduler, especially when the
vices; for example, an MBR for FB Internet service backhaul is a potential bottleneck. It is challenging
on both the DL and the UL (although different to design a scheduler for MU-MIMO that protects
values), or a guaranteed IPTV service. The first the different services and is both backhaul and
challenge is thus a planning (or dimensioning) SLA-aware, and a good compromise in terms of
problem. As always, there are different flavors of performance and complexity needs to be found.
the planning problem, but we expect that, initially
at least, the placement problem can be avoided Backhaul Challenges
by using the existing 4G infrastructure. Selecting The MBRs expected from the RAN can only be
the right band(s) is critical to 5G FWA. MNOs delivered if the backhaul is also dimensioned
need to know which bands work better in the 5G appropriately. Until now, the backhaul has been
rural FB context. Are mmWave bands useful for dimensioned for mobile users, who have no
access or for backhaul (discussed next), or are MBR expectation. However, FWA services will
only sub-6 GHz bands practical? Once the appro- require MNOs to make significant upgrades to
priate bands are determined, the next problem is their backhaul. As mentioned earlier, rural back-
to determine how many homes can be offered FB haul is primarily based on multihop MWP2P links,
for these bands. Specifically, given a fixed amount which are licensed per channel and per hop.
of access and backhaul resources (e.g., band(s), Due to the low amount of long-range MWP2P
bandwidth, transmit power, characteristics of the spectrum that remains unused, it could become
massive MIMO antennas at the RAN and homes), increasingly difficult for MNOs to secure sufficient
an MNO needs to determine the maximum channel licenses for their rural backhaul links in
number of active homes that can be given the order to meet the QoE for FWA. Furthermore,
MBRs in a given cell [12]. Note that this problem the multihop structure makes it critical to prop-
is difficult at many levels: it involves MU-MIMO erly dimension the hops for both users as well as
(hence the need for precoding and combining), downstream BSs.
couples the UL and DL via TDD (because there is At existing sites that are already backhauled
an opportunity to intelligently configure the TDD via MWP2P, one possibility we see is IAB being
frame according to the traffic mix), and couples used to augment existing backhaul capacity. In
the RAN and backhaul. Homes at the cell edge considering this, MNOs must understand under
will also place more burden on the system, and it which conditions (mmWave vs. mid-band, in-band
might be better to offer different MBRs depending vs. out-of-band, MBR requirements) IAB is a good
on the location of the homes as was done in the alternative or complement to adding MWP2P
past with DSL. backhaul capacity. The primary challenge with
MNOs must understand the benefits of adding a dual IAB-MWP2P backhaul approach is that it
more antennas at the RAN or the homes and the falls outside the scope of current standards: so far,
importance of transmit power. On one hand, larg- IAB has been specified as a standalone backhaul
er cell sizes and lower densities of homes in rural technology with no specification for its coexis-
areas present a good environment for beamform- tence with other backhaul technologies. This is
ing. However, the large coverage requirement likely due to the wide differences in how backhaul
could also cause a power imbalance between the functionality is deployed in each technology: IAB
UL and DL. This must be studied since it could employs many of the same protocols and sched-
result in an imbalance with respect to the num- uling mechanisms that are used for access in the
ber of homes that can be given their MBR in the RAN, while MWP2P has its own set of protocols.
UL vs. the DL. In earlier generations, the place- Nonetheless, steps have recently been made
ment of rural BSs was done with mobile services toward convergence of 3GPP and non-3GPP
in mind and mostly for coverage (i.e., the trade-off access (as discussed in the next section), so it
between capacity and coverage was very much could very well be worth studying the coexistence
biased toward coverage). The right trade-off for of heterogeneous backhaul technologies.
5G FWA might well be very different given the For new sites in rural areas, MNOs might con-
greater capacity requirements to support FB. sider using a standalone IAB solution instead of
Hence, if 5G FWA for FB becomes successful in MWP2P backhaul. However, since its introduction

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in Release 16, IAB has mainly been envisioned as a
way to replace fiber or MWP2P backhaul in urban Traffic Path

areas through the use of wide-bandwidth mmWave ATSSS

Mobile Network
bands [8]. Rural backhaul links need to be long- Operator
range, so the key question is whether mmWave-
based IAB could meet this need. Mobility is not N3IWF
Internet
of concern in this scenario, and with out-of-band
IAB, the beamforming would be very simple to Wired Network
implement since the only “users” are the neighbor- Operator
ing fixed BSs. Hence, it is important to understand
the possible distances and capacities of mmWave
IAB links between rural BSs. Even though IAB also Figure 4. 5G access traffic steering, switching, and splitting (ATSSS) functions
supports use of sub-6 GHz bands, less bandwidth could enable dual connectivity between 5G and legacy technologies at
is available in these bands relative to mmWave, rural homes. With ATSSS, user traffic is routed through the 5GC, regardless
and it is also expected that MNOs will need to use of the access technology used (3GPP or non-3GPP).
these bands to increase access capacity. Hence,
sub-6 GHz bands might not be viable as indepen- Clearly, implementing an MBR in a heteroge-
dent IAB backhaul solutions. neous context is challenging — if at all possible —
and would depend, among other things, on which
CompatibilitY with LegacY Technologies entity is in control of the box.
While we view 5G as a long-term solution for In Release 16, 3GPP has introduced a new
rural FB, it will be some time before MNOs can set of functions called access traffic steering,
fully deploy 5G to rural locations so that commu- switching, and splitting (ATSSS) to support dual
nities can depend on it exclusively. Nevertheless, connectivity with non-3GPP technologies [14].
most rural communities already have infrastruc- Here, steering, switching, and splitting refer to
ture in place from earlier legacy broadband tech- the network selection, handover, and aggregation
nologies, such as DSL or cable. Thus, there will described above, respectively, where the entity
be a period — at least temporarily, and possibly in charge is the 5G MNO. ATSSS functionality is
longer-term — where 5G coexists with legacy net- located within the 5GC and at the FWA modem
working technologies in rural communities. A key as shown in Fig. 4, and operates alongside anoth-
challenge then is how to deal with this heteroge- er new function called the non-3GPP interworking
neity in the network in a way that ensures the best function (N3IWF), which acts as the point of con-
possible QoE for users. These kinds of problems vergence between the non-3GPP network and
are rarely addressed by the research community the 5GC. ATSSS functionality in Releases 16 and
while they often plague the engineers in charge 17 is based on MP-TCP; however, 3GPP has stud-
of deploying such systems. ied multipath QUIC for ATSSS and could support
This potentially yields a situation where homes it in the future.
are connected to two networks, one cellular and An important feature of 3GPP ATSSS is that all
one wired. This dual access introduces a number user traffic is tunneled through the MNO's 5GC,
of complexities due to the use of different technol- and the ATSSS policies are defined by the MNO.
ogies (in both the access and the backhaul) and Thus, ATSSS puts control on the 5G side, mak-
due to the heterogeneous link characteristics (e.g., ing it much easier for MNOs to monitor instan-
bandwidth, latency, packet loss). This dual access taneous rates given to dual-connected users and
can be handled by a box installed at the home that implement policies to ensure SLAs are satisfied.
selects one technology or both. Note that the enti- For operators that have cellular and wireline
ty in control of the box could be the 5G MNO, the networks, ATSSS could prove very useful for effec-
legacy operator, or a third party. This would impact tively using their legacy network alongside 5G.
what is possible. The technology selection might However, for the case where standalone legacy
be defined by static policies, such as the type of operators provide dual access with 5G MNOs,
application or time of day; however, adaptive steer- ATSSS requires the legacy operators to forfeit
ing based on the performance of each link would control to the MNOs. One alternative might be to
be able to provide better QoE to users, although it have a neutral third party host the core network
would be more difficult to implement. Because link functions that are necessary for convergence and
performance and user flows are dynamic, mech- coordinate policies between the two operators.
anisms are also required to hand users over from Virtualization would make such an arrangement
one technology to another, possibly mid-connec- with a neutral host scalable.
tion, without disrupting QoE. In the end, the 3GPP/non-3GPP dual-access
To support simultaneous use of 5G FWA with problem is difficult to generalize and might be
a legacy technology, the box will need to sup- best solved with coordination among the applica-
port multipath protocols, such as multipath TCP ble industry consortiums. ATSSS is just one pos-
(MP-TCP). However, MP-TCP is less effective sible solution, but it is still a nascent technology,
when connection paths are more heterogeneous, and 3GPP is working alongside the Broadband
which can cause head-of-line blocking issues. To Forum and CableLabs to standardize the function-
avoid this problem, multipath QUIC [13] could be ality for DSL and cable, respectively.
used, but it presents its own challenge to opera-
tors: specifically, it limits how effectively network Infrastructure Sharing
operators can utilize proxies or caches in the net- In the past, to reduce costs, MNOs serving the
work [11, 13]. In recognition of this limitation, same geographic regions sometimes formulated
extensions to QUIC have recently been proposed network sharing agreements. Depending on the
as workarounds to this issue [13]. arrangement, BSs, backhaul links, and/or band(s)

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 might all be shared between operators. In the con- households, thus meeting government-established
text of 5G FWA where MNOs will promise MBRs minimum bit rate targets and helping reduce the
to FB subscribers, infrastructure and resource so-called digital divide. We have also discussed the
sharing could be all the more critical; however, many new challenges related to network planning
it could also be very challenging for competing and operation, and coexistence with legacy tech-
operators to provide service guarantees under nologies and other operators.
traditional network sharing policies. For example,
MNOs may bring different resources (amounts or References
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is to share these resources in a way that is fair to pdf, accessed: July 15, 2021.
[2] FCC “2021 Broadband Deployment Report,” Washington,
operators (and hence users) while also preventing DC, Jan. 2021; https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/
free-riders. Considering this, advances in 5G net- FCC-21-18A1.pdf, accessed: July 15, 2021.
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vided to a user directly via satellite) [16]. This adds Biographies
new challenges due to the latency in the radio link, Andrew Lappalainen ([email protected]) is a
very large cell areas, and, depending on the orbit RAN performance and spectrum strategy engineer with Xplor-
of the satellite, the possibility that the cell could net Communications Inc. He received his M.A.Sc. in electrical
move relative to the users. Given these challenges, and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo,
Ontario, Canada in 2021 and his B.Sc. in mathematics and engi-
and the uncertainty of the long-term capacity of neering from Queen's University at Kingston in 2012. From
satellite, it is unclear if satellite can be used to pro- 2012 to 2018, he was a cellular network engineer at TELUS. His
vide access to rural areas at a large scale. research interests are in wireless communications and computer
networking and their application for social good.
Conclusion Catherine Rosenberg [F] ([email protected]) is currently a pro-
In this article, we have presented new and upcom- fessor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer-
ing advances from 5G in 3GPP Releases 16 and ing, University of Waterloo. She is also the Canada Research
17, which we believe will enable 5G FWA to meet Chair in the Future Internet and the Cisco Research Chair in 5G
Systems. Her research interests include networking and wireless.
the coverage and capacity requirements necessary She is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. More
to offer (good) fixed broadband services to rural information is available at https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/cath/.

84 IEEE Communications Standards Magazine • June 2022

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