We have seen that millimeter wave can be immensely beneficial in some of the urban scenarios, be it dense urban or suburban last mile solution. But what about rural areas? Rural areas tend to be plagued with their own set of challenges when it comes to providing broadband connectivity to individual homes. Fundamental reason is that homes in rural areas are typically separated far apart from each other. Your nearest neighbor could be as far as a quarter mile away from you. From an Internet service provider's viewpoint, it becomes not just expensive, but somewhat prohibitive to run individual cables from a local hub to those individual homes that are separated far apart. That's why rural areas don't garner much attention from established ISPs for economical reasons, and that is one prominent reason why rural areas have traditionally been underserved, and have lagged behind as far as a broadband Internet connectivity is concerned. Can millimeter wave in any way solve this challenge? Well, it definitely can. Imagine a rural area. Let's say these are your target homes. Traditionally, this would be, for example, an ISP hub. An ISP would have to run miles long cables from the hub to individual homes, which would be prohibitive, as we mentioned. Imagine on the other hand, how a millimeter wave deployment would look like. Let's say instead of a hub, the ISP, or equivalently, a cellular network operator builds a millimeter wave base station atop a tall tower, so to speak, so that it has line of sight with the entire village. Once you have a millimeter wave base station atop a tall tower, it's millimeter wave signal can reach all these homes and all the other homes in this particular town as well. On account of it's large bandwidth and other benefits, you can see that this millimeter wave base station will be in a position to provide wireless broadband connectivity to all these homes, and all the advantages regarding flexibility and scalability continue to apply. For example, if you have a new home over here interested in getting wireless broadband service, no worries, the wireless signal already reaches that home, and all you need to do is subscribe to that service, buy the necessary hardware and voila, within a matter of an afternoon, you have wireless broadband connectivity to your home, something that would earlier take weeks or months, if at all, it were possible. So millimeter wave is not only beneficial in urban areas, but it has some practical use cases in rural areas as well. Given the recent emphasis from various global governments to bridge the connectivity gap between those who have broadband access versus those who don't, it can be easy to see how millimeter wave can narrow the gap between the connected and not connected by providing near instantaneous access to wireless broadband to rural communities that have traditionally been underserved. But as always, we're here to think critically. We earlier said that millimeter wave might have small network coverage by default. Then based on that, you would ask, hey, can a millimeter wave base station indeed travel beyond a few homes? Well, it is indeed possible for the millimeter wave signal to do so provided you configure your millimeter wave operation correctly. We won't get into those operational details, but I will give you one very interesting fact. Qualcomm, in the recent months, has been participating in such trials wherein we are experimenting with providing broadband wireless access to rural communities. Our latest tests indicate that it is possible to deploy millimeter wave in such a way that you should be able to receive millimeter wave signal as far as five miles or eight kilometers away from the millimeter wave base station. As you can tell, five miles is more than enough to cover an entire village, or sometimes even two adjacent villages or towns. Given that the millimeter wave has been practically tested not in a lab, but in the real fields to be able to successfully propagate it's signal' and the receiver being able to successfully receive that broadband signal as far as five miles of it, this gives you a practical demonstration of how millimeter wave can solve the traditional connectivity problem in rural areas by providing near instantaneous long-range broadband service in such underserved communities. Now, one question that some of you might ask is, hey, I get the idea that you can install a millimeter wave base station in a rural area. But how are you going to connect it to the core network in the back-end? Wouldn't you have to run a cable after all, going to the core network, which may be located several miles away? So you still have that bottleneck of having to run that miles-long cable between this [inaudible] and the core network. One might ask, hey, how are you going to solve that problem? Well, with the advent of millimeter wave, you don't even have to run that miles-long cable anymore. That solution technically is called the backhaul or integrated or access and backhaul solution. What happens here? Is that considered the front end? There is a millimeter wave base station, and it is providing wireless broadband service to all these homes using millimeter wave find each channel. That part is well understood. However, what about the connectivity from the base station to the core network, which in technical terms is called backhaul? What about the backhaul? Well, the backhaul in modern terms can also be millimeter wave, in that this millimeter wave base station will treat the core network just as any other user and transmit a long range millimeter wave signal back to the core network, and if you have a receiver millimeter wave base station at the core network site, it should be possible for you to receive, demodulate and decode that signal. By making this particular backhaul link work over 5G millimeter wave wireless, you have effectively obviated any need that you would otherwise have to run a miles-long cable between the core network and your individual [inaudible]. That backhaul can now also be served over millimeter wave wireless. That makes millimeter wave deployments truly mobile, in that this base station will no longer have any cables coming out of it. It will no longer be tethered to something, and it will make it truly mobile. For example, if this position of the base station was considered optimized earlier, but now the new optimized position is somewhere here, all you can do is move that base station from here to here. Because there is no cable tethering that base station to the core network, this mobility is relatively easy to accomplish, and that is what further accelerates deployments of wireless broadband in rural areas because it is simply about moving a portable millimeter wave base station. For example, that millimeter wave base station doesn't have to be rooted in the ground either. It can be on top of a truck or any other vehicle, and simply, it is about moving that vehicle from one point to another in order to optimize your coverage and your two-port and other requirements in real time. That is the true power of 5G millimeter wave, in that it can not only provide wireless broadband on the front end, but it can make the backhaul wireless as well, and that brings us into the age of truly mobile or truly wireless broadband. Once again, if you think this is a pipe dream or a theoretical idea, not so. There are some promising trials ongoing in the United States that are validating this idea in real terms as a prototype wherein a millimeter wave base station would have a wireless backhaul to the core network instead of a traditional wired backhaul. Trials are in progress to solve this problem as well. When we succeed, not if, but when we succeed, we will have had a truly wireless end-to-end broadband system facilitated by 5G millimeter wave.
