Check 5G FWA feasibility before you roll a truck

Fixed Wireless Access turns a radio sector into home and business broadband, but only where the signal can reach the receiver unobstructed. A single rooftop in the way, a stand of trees at the wrong height, a ridge between the mast and the address, and the link that looked feasible on a flat coverage map will never connect.

The usual way to find out is to send someone. A survey climbs the tower, sights the rooftop, and reports back days later. Every truck roll to a link that was never going to clear is time and cost spent learning what the data already knew.

Most coverage analysis works in two dimensions: where the signal lands on the ground. FWA is the one question that depends on height. The mast is at one elevation, the receiver at another, and everything between them, terrain, buildings, vegetation, decides whether the link clears. A 2D coverage layer simply cannot see the rooftop that blocks the ray.

This is why neo360 plans FWA on detailed 3D data rather than a flat basemap. Every meter of the path is analyzed against building footprints with rooftops, vegetation with height attributes and a digital terrain model, not a single sampled point.

The FWA module consumes rfMAP data, Lepton’s high-precision geographic data for wireless telecom networks. That is the layer that carries 3D buildings with rooftops, vegetation with height, terrain and surface models, the height information line-of-sight and Fresnel analysis depend on.

Because the basemap is built for RF planning, feasibility on neo360 is read off the same precise data your network team already trusts, rather than a generic map that was never meant for radio.

Feasibility on neo360 is not a single sampled reading. The analysis is fine-grained: every meter on every building along the path is evaluated, not just one spot, so an obstruction halfway down the link is caught rather than missed. Any entity on the map is fully interactive and inspectable, so a planner can click a building, a sector or a receiver and read the detail behind the verdict.

The rendering is built for scale. A streaming rendering engine carries large basemaps, so the same line-of-sight and Fresnel checks that work for one address hold up across a sector, a city, a footprint.

neo360 is an active product, deployed live at Vodafone. The geo-analytics platform that carries 5G FWA planning is the same one running in a national telecom operator’s environment, not a demo build.