CSIRO's Ngara aims to solve the same problem of rural access [1]. It was designed about 10 years ago, with a view to being the rural segment of Australia's Nat

CSIRO's Ngara aims to solve the same problem of rural access [1]. It was designed about 10 years ago, with a view to being the rural segment of Australia's National Broadband Network, but the NBN passed on the technology. Ngara was designed to work in the vacated VHF/UHF TV bands (but will work in other bands). It uses MIMO with a large number (~32) of antennas to do spatial multiplexing rather than FB's "brute force" sectoring. Sectoring is a disadvantage of FB's method, as the sectoring will limit the multipath and the ability to do spatial multiplexing via MIMO. With sectoring you will only get full capacity if your terminals are evenly distributed in azimuth. With MIMO you can get full capacity as long as the antenna has a big enough aperture to resolve each user, which will work better if you happen to have a small settlement in the cell. MIMO can also trade spatial multiplexing for diversity, which will allow longer range if there are fewer users. FB could do a lot worse than just buying Ngara. [1] https://research.csiro.au/wireless/888-2/ https://research.csiro.au/wireless/888-2/