With 5.5G, Zain creates digital oases in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Vision 2030 is an ambitious plan to support small- and mid-sized enterprises and improve the quality of life for Saudi citizens. One of its pillars is providing high-quality broadband access across the Kingdom.

Traditionally, optical deployment in the Kingdom was held back by the extreme heat, which frequently tops 50°C in the summer. So, Zain turned to 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) for home users and small businesses. FWA only needs a CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) device to convert 5G signals to high-performance Wi-Fi.

FWA has been a success with Zain’s Saudi users, doubling every year since 2020. As many as 10% of FWA users now connect 10 devices per CPE. They also use new services such as Extended Reality (XR), gaming, and the IoT. By 2025, customers will need an estimated 500Mbps to support these services. 

Zain KSA and Huawei designed their FWA² solution to meet the requirements of three specific user segments. First, for home users, there is FWA Pro. It utilizes an innovative networking model that combines a single wireless CPE and a single fiber per room to support multiple applications. Its deployment consists of ELAAs (extremely large antenna arrays), carrier aggregation technologies, and high-performance 5G CPEs. The solution guarantees stable ultra-high downlink speed of over 300Mbps and latency under 10ms to support 8K videos, large-scale cloud gaming, home security monitoring, and VR sports for multiple concurrent home users.

Second is Zain KSA’s new FWA Lite solution, for users without home broadband or those better served by a lower-speed network. With RedCap CPEs, this solution offers downlink rates of up to 150Mbps, 30% higher user experience than 4G WTTx, and 50% lower power consumption than standard 5G CPEs. Zain KSA plans to migrate 4G WTTx users to 5G FWA this year. The solution is also ideal for bringing home broadband to unconnected people in other countries in the Gulf region.

The third user segment is business users, such as retail outlets, warehouses, and banks undergoing digital transformation. The new FWA Business Solution is designed to grow the super uplink service market for SMEs using the deterministic assurance (guaranteed network quality) provided by 5.5G high-bandwidth private lines. It guarantees uplink rates between 50Mbps and 1Gbps, with a latency under 20ms, and 99.99% reliability.