Wireless ISP’s are facing significant costs associated with BDC paperwork and the risk of having their 5GHz networks overbuilt with BEAD funding. All WISPs, including those using Ubiquiti, Mimosa, Airspan, will learn how to streamline their BDC submissions and develop plans to avoid overbuilds at minimal cost.
Our presenters will remain on the line as long as it takes to answer all questions from live participants.
Presenter:
Matt Mangriotis, Sr. Director - Product Line Management, Cambium Networks
You are absolutely correct that the goal for this webinar was to inform those interested that we have both hardware and software that can qualify to protect network footprints from being overbuilt using BEAD funding, as well as provide a solution to facilitate BDC reporting. I did go over some important rules around BDC reporting and the importance of doing so.
We believe that accurately reporting network data following the guidelines is supremely important. Since the cnHeat product (with BDC data reporting) was launched 7 months ago (when this webinar took place, before the 1st reporting period… we have now passed the 2nd reporting period deadline on March 1, 2023) hundreds of customers have taken advantage of this and been very satisfied with the results it provides. Regarding what it doesn’t do, there are certain variables that are specific to the operator, and cnHeat is unable to know them. If you would like to discuss details, we’d be happy to do that with you, though we’d love for you to start a thread with your specific questions here:
Regarding your last questions, there are several 3 GHz solutions, which (at the time of the webinar) were an alternative to using unlicensed spectrum to serve customers and risk being overbuilt by someone obtaining BEAD funding for fiber. I offer the 3 GHz Omni radio as the lowest cost solution. You quite correctly point out that the purpose of doing that would be only to protect that footprint from being overbuilt, and that you’d not likely be able to obtain BEAD funding to do deployments in that area. The alternative to 3 GHz Omni radios could be a plan to deploy 3 GHz 450m, which has much better coverage and capacity and could provide 100/20 Mbps service to qualify for BEAD funding. We continue to drive improvements in performance on the PMP 450 platform and in fact discuss some of these on a more recent webinar here:
Unfortunately, if you listen to that one, you’ll have to put up with me “selling” system performance improvements in the PMP 450 platform (via software advancements, at no cost to the operator).
We really do value the time you spend contributing to the forum, thanks!
