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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report that means the deployment of a lot of fiber. This is going to be a huge hurdle for any wireless company that doesn't have a huge capital budget for fiber. Many analysts still believe that the unwillingness to fund fiber will be the hurdle that will quash a lot of the grandiose 5G plans. Can the Wireless Networks Handle that Much Traffic? For cellular to be a challenge to landline broadband means carrying huge amounts of data on the cellular network. Today, wireless networks carry less than 5%of all of the broadband in the country—and cell sites are currently full. Even with a proliferation of small cell sites it seems unlikely that the cellular network will ever carry a giant share of the broadband out of a neighborhood. Household usage of broadband has exploded. In the first quarter of 2018, the average US home used 215 gigabytes of data per month. In the third quarter of this year that grew to 384 gigabytes per household. By 2024 the average home might be using more than 700 gigabytes per month. The wireless carriers do not have a goal to carry such gigabit volumes of data. Pricintg. US cellular data is among the most expensive broadband among developed countries. For 5G to compete with landline broadband, the cellular companies would have to kill the paradigm of selling an extra gigabyte of data for$10—and that's where they make their money. Cellular companies would not be price competitive with landline broadband even if data prices were reduced to ten cents per gigabyte. My conclusion is that there are huge economic hurdles for the cellular companies to overcome to try to compete in an urban area as a primary broadband provider. There will be customers who will be happy with cellular data as their only broadband just as there are today. Because we all use more data-intensive applications over time, a 100 Mbps cellular connection a decade from now may not be much better from a practical perspective than a 12 Mbps connection today. Future Technologies Many new technologies are likely coming within the next few years to the US. Next Generation Fiber Technologies. There are two next-generation and competing fiber-to-the-home technologies that will allow connections to customers to be upgraded to 10 Gbps broadband and even faster-NG-PON2 or XGS-PON. The current widely deployed GPON technology will eventually hit a technology wall. The technology delivers 2.4 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream for up to 32 customers, although many networks are configured to serve 16 customers at most. This is still an adequate amount of bandwidth today for residential customers and can easily provide a gigabit product to every customer if desired. GPON technology is over a decade old, which generally is a signal to the industry to look for the next generation replacement. This pressure usually starts with vendors who want to make money pushing the latest and greatest new technology - and this time it's no different. After taking all of the vendor hype out of the equation it's always been the case that any new technology is only going to be accepted once that new technology achieves an industry-wide economy of scale. That means being accepted by at least one large ISP. Page 78