003. The Business Case for DeWi; It Just Makes Cents
When compared to the AWS private LTE offering, Pollen Mobile is 90%+ cheaper and has much more powerful radio options that provide 25–30x more coverage.
There’s an innovative new movement within the telecom industry called decentralized wireless (DeWi), enabled by the deregulation of CBRS cellular spectrum. This deregulation allows anyone to create their own cell phone network, just as the deregulation of WiFi spectrum in 1985 revolutionized Internet connectivity and access around the world.
As the attractiveness of this new design space becomes more and more clear, other market entrants are launching offerings utilizing free, unlicensed CBRS spectrum, but are doing so in a centralized, non-crypto native way. This results in a wireless network offering that is far inferior to the DeWi alternative on a number of important dimensions, including cost. In this article, we’ll be comparing Amazon Web Services’ recent private LTE product launch to Pollen Mobile’s offering, as the current decentralized cellular market leader. Helium 5G and many other similar decentralized cellular projects have launched or are launching soon, which will only increase the amount of innovation and value-add the DeWi space has to offer.
Public vs. private network?
Currently, Pollen Mobile only offers a public network option, while AWS only offers a private network option. This means that anyone can access the Pollen network, while only whitelisted or approved users/devices can access a customer-specific AWS network. While there are some additional costs inherent to a private LTE offering, we don’t believe them to be meaningful (~$10 per user per month), especially given the drastic cost differences between Pollen’s offering and that of AWS. In the future, we believe that AWS and Pollen will both offer public and private network options.
Power limits and radio types
AWS only uses radios that are deemed “Cat A.” Pollen uses both “Cat A” and “Cat B” radios. Cat B radios are far more powerful and can cover 50–100 city blocks, rather than just the 2–3 city blocks that Cat A radios cover. Cat B radios can cover entire neighborhoods and stadiums, as depicted below at Minute Maid Park in Houston, TX (photo credits to @pplantenna on Twitter):
Yearly cost per radio
The yearly cost per radio difference between Pollen Mobile and AWS is astounding. Pollen Mobile Dandelions (their Cat A radio offering) cost a one-time fee of $776. AWS’ Cat A radio offering costs a whopping $7,200 a month, or $86,400 a year! It’s important to note that most use cases would require 5+ Cat A radios to create any kind of broad-based, usable network.
Cost per GB
Pollen Mobile data transfer is currently free and unlimited, but will move to $0.50 a GB in “Phase II” of its network, expected in the next 3–6 months. Once Pollen is in Phase II, AWS will have a slight edge in terms of cost per GB. AWS provides 100 GBs free and then charges $0.09 a GB after that, but they more than make up for this difference in the yearly cost to rent their radios!
Total cost comparison
Ericsson estimates that there is ~15 GBs of data usage per smartphone per month. Taking into account other use cases that may use more data, such as high-end manufacturing, AI, AR, and VR, we can measure data usage in terabytes (1,024 GBs).
The absolute maximum TBs per month one Cat A radio such as the Baicells Nova 227 can handle is 40 TBs. This is the absolute, theoretical maximum with 100% uptime and usage and likely would be closer to 20 TBs in a realistic, in-the-field scenario. It’s therefore quite amusing that the breakeven point for the AWS and Pollen offerings is >5x the theoretical maximum and >10x+ the realistic maximum, at ~204 TBs per month! This means there is no possible scenario in which the AWS offering is cheaper than Pollen’s offering, and in most cases, it will be far, far more expensive.
Here’s a table with cost differences for Pollen and AWS, yearly (one radio and per GB cost at various data usage amounts):
While this wasn’t a perfect apples-to-apples comparison and only represents AWS’ first step into the private LTE market, the massive differences in cost more than make up for any discrepancies in the comparison. Granted, the Amazon price tag brings with it an assortment of enterprise-friendly features: carrier grade data/voice mobile core and direct integration with everything AWS has to offer. For some enterprise customers the cost of AWS private LTE may be a drop in the bucket, whereas for others, the AWS bells and whistles are an unnecessary hit to the bottom line. For the latter, a DeWi solution could be just right.
Amazon’s entrance into the private LTE market is reminiscent of its Sidewalk IoT network announcement almost three years ago. Both are examples of DeWi frontrunning one of the largest companies on Earth! These announcements validate our thesis that this is a design space worth exploring and an enticing opportunity to innovate in one of the largest markets in the world: telecom. DeWi as a whole has only been around for ~3 years, decentralized cellular even less. We’re confident that the DeWi space will continue to innovate at the edge of wireless connectivity and we’re excited to help accelerate this process.
