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# Tarana CEO Sees No Clear Successor to Video Driving Household Bandwidth Demand
- URL: https://broadbandbreakfast.com/tarana-ceo-sees-no-clear-successor-to-video-driving-household-bandwidth-demand/
- Published: 2026-09-24T23:55:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-24T23:56:05.000Z
- Description: AI’s largest capacity demands will fall on data centers and the connections between them – not last-mile home connections – Alwan says
- Author: Akul Saxena
- Tags: Wireless, ngFWA, Tarana Wireless, Connecting Communities Summit 2026, NextLink Internet, CBRS, BEAD, Ogallala, Neb., Bienville Parish, La., Tarana G2, Basil Alwan, Carl Guardino, #with-siderail, FWA, Tarana Wireless Summit 2026

MILPITAS, Calif., Sept. 24, 2026 — Slower growth in household bandwidth demand is strengthening the case for fixed wireless broadband, argues Tarana Wireless CEO **Basil Alwan**.

Average usage per home during the network’s busiest hour is about 5 to 7 Megabits per second (Mbps), Alwan said, speaking at the [company's Connecting Communities Summit here](https://news.taranawireless.com/connecting-communities-summit-sept-2026?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com) on Sept. 17\. Consumption varies little among subscribers on 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps and gigabit download plans, although faster connections remain useful for tasks such as downloading files.

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Bandwidth [demand is growing](https://news.taranawireless.com/connecting-communities-summit-sept-2026?ref=broadbandbreakfast.com) about 10 to 12 percent annually, down from the 20 to 30 percent rates sustained for years. Tarana, based in this Silicon Valley community, makes fixed wireless equipment that connects homes to nearby towers, competing with fiber and other broadband technologies.

The transition from text and images to streaming video repeatedly drove demand for more capacity, Alwan said. He said he saw no equally obvious next application poised to repeat that expansion, though he acknowledged that a new one could emerge.

“It’s just the first time there hasn’t been an automatic clear next application that’s going to drive bandwidth growth,” he said.

The peak-hour figure describes average traffic per household, not the maximum speed a household might need. Short periods of heavy use, including large downloads, still benefit from connections delivering hundreds of megabits per second, he said.

### *AI connectivity needs will focus on data centers*

Artificial intelligence could increase the number of devices needing reliable connections without producing a comparable surge in bandwidth requirements for each home, Alwan said. Connected vehicles, robots and other machines will need widespread coverage, while AI applications could also increase traffic uploaded from users.

The largest capacity demands, in his assessment, will fall inside data centers and on the connections between them. The need to move more data between processors is pushing optical connections into shorter distances within computing systems, where copper links are reaching their performance limits.

Moving more computing into small facilities near users would require a stronger economic justification, he argued. Building thousands of such facilities would be expensive, and applications generally develop around the infrastructure already available.

“So the idea that a GPU is going to be sitting in a cell tower serving up some sort of AI workload is interesting, but it’s not likely, I would say,” he said. Graphics processing units perform several parallel calculations simultaneously, helping train AI models and run them to generate responses.

The stakes of broadband access will also rise as AI tools become more widely available, Alwan argued. People without internet access would lack tools their connected peers can use, deepening the disadvantage of being offline. He predicted that governments would increasingly have to treat connectivity as a right.

### *Harder-to-reach homes put pressure on fiber economics*

Slower demand growth coincides with increasingly difficult fiber construction, Alwan said. As providers connect denser neighborhoods and locations where installation is easier, the remaining homes tend to be more expensive to reach.

The share of households that subscribe also affects whether a fiber project recovers its construction costs. In a hypothetical project costing $1,500 per home passed, a 50 percent subscription rate would mean $3,000 in construction spending per customer before adding the final connection and equipment inside the home.

Competition from fixed wireless and satellite can put that subscription rate under pressure, he said. But he rejected the idea that one technology would replace all the others.

“Fiber makes perfect sense in some places, satellite is the only answer in some places, [wireless is a great option](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/bead-faces-supply-chain-spike-and-near-certain-defaults-as-program-shifts-to-construction-panelists-said/) in others,” he said.

Mobile carriers face a separate constraint when selling home broadband over their existing networks. Residential connections consume substantially more capacity than mobile subscriptions, requiring carriers to limit how many homes they serve in each coverage area, Alwan said.

Using spare mobile-network capacity for home internet is sensible, he argued, but providers must protect the experience of their mobile customers as that capacity fills.

### *Tarana bets on shared spectrum*

Serving more homes wirelessly will require more efficient use of available airwaves, Alwan said. He advocated sharing spectrum at moderate power, with coordination systems and interference-management technology allowing frequencies to be reused across networks.

Tarana’s [equipment operates in the shared](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/cbrs-could-be-key-to-scaling-fixed-wireless-broadband/) 3.5 GigaHertz (GHz) Citizens Broadband Radio Service band and unlicensed portions of the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands. Its second-generation system, G2, can combine capacity from those bands into one connection, a technique called carrier aggregation.

The company’s equipment serves about 330,000 homes and has been deployed in 1,358 U.S. counties, according to figures Alwan presented. He expects the number of connected homes to reach the millions within the next few years.

Tarana equipment is [already carrying service](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/tag/tarana-wireless/) funded by the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. In May, Vistabeam, a Nebraska-based broadband provider, announced what it described as the nation’s first reported BEAD-funded household connection near Ogallala, west Nebraska . The home received download speeds exceeding 800 Mbps and upload speeds above 200 Mbps, according to the provider.

In northwest Louisiana, a tower activated May 1 in Bienville Parish made service available to 104 BEAD-funded locations, according to ISP Nextlink Internet. The site uses Tarana’s G2 equipment with shared 3.5 GHz CBRS spectrum and unlicensed 6 GHz spectrum. It forms part of an $18.5 million grant intended to reach 7,460 locations across the state.