The price Comcast pays is highly confidential. The $3,000/cell price is a guess based on the market and the continued drop in component pricing. Comcast has facilities to mount the ultra-small cells across more than a third of the US. Much is above-ground and ready to add wireless cells. No new fiber is needed; low-latency DOCSIS 3.1 has plenty of capacity.
It will probably coordinate the deployment with Charter, which is almost the same size. Together, they have over 9 million mobile subscribers. Most traffic is going over home and office Wi-Fi, but the cablecos are paying hundreds of millions to Verizon for the rest.
I believe T-Mobile is paying Verizon per byte. Any traffic off-loaded to CBRS will reduce the bill.
Spectrum and Comcast expect to add 2.5-3 million more mobile subs in the next 12 months. That should bring them to breakeven. The business should be highly profitable in two or three more years.
The installation costs should be relatively low. Comcast is already touching almost every line in the next three years to upgrade DOCSIS 3.1 to 100 Mbps or a gigabit on the upstream.
Fixed wireless from Verizon and T-Mobile adds ~800,000 more subscribers each quarter. Only about half of the US is serviceable, but that should go coverage will reach 75% to 85% very quickly.
There is massive overcapacity in most locations where mid--band is deployed. T-Mobile claims 2 million FWA customers are well served with the 5G mid-band network they were already building. There has been no added capex required.
My guess is that the network T-Mobile is building for mobile should be able to service most of the 8 million FWA subscribers planned. It will fall short in some locations, but traditional small cells should fill in most gaps.
The prospect of this competition has driven Verizon & T=Mobile to some of their lowest levels in the last ten years.
Samsung’s New 5G CBRS Strand Small Cell
As a simple and easy-to-deploy outdoor small cell solution, Samsung’s new 5G CBRS Strand unit can help cable companies advance their growth and service expansion strategies. Comcast will be the first to use Samsung’s new small cell solution with their CBRS licenses and is actively testing several of our other 5G radio solutions.
For MSOs, Samsung’s 5G CBRS Strand Small Cell has been designed by Samsung to be an optimal solution to support the cable and broadband industry’s mobile service strategies. Designed to be installed on outdoor aerial cables, this compact and lightweight solution can be easily deployed. It integrates baseband, radio and antenna into a single form factor and will support two sectors to deliver high capacity across a wide wireless coverage area. The solution will also have integrated DOCSIS 3.1 modem for backhaul, and is also DOCSIS 4.0 ready.
Furthermore, Samsung’s 5G CBRS Strand Small Cell will support wide bandwidth of up to 80MHz across the entire CBRS spectrum, and provides dynamic configuration capabilities to meet MSOs specific power consumption requirements.
The 5G CBRS Strand unit will be equipped with the company’s newest in-house chipset—a second generation 5G modem System on a Chip (SoC)—which delivers increased capacity, performance, as well as feature parity with mobile operators’ requirements and a single unified element management solution. It will be able to deliver consistent performance with flexible antenna configurations capable of providing 90-, 180- and 360-degree coverage, depending on the MSO’s target service area.
As MSOs and cable companies advance their own commercial mobile networks, Samsung’s 5G CBRS Strand Small Cell will play a central role in helping them accelerate their growth. By using their own CBRS spectrum—and less on contracted MVNO capacity—MSOs can expand their 5G cellular coverage and offer intelligent bundling options. This will ultimately provide a scalable wireless solution that MSOs can commercially deploy almost anywhere in their cable service areas.
