The Wireless Industry's Boat Anchor Problem

Adapted from joshlambert.xyz.

Do you remember 2010? We were all playing Angry Birds, wearing Silly Bandz, and watching a 16-year-old Canadian kid with a swooping haircut take over the planet singing “Baby.” Justin Bieber was the new hotness. If you didn’t have Bieber fever, you were irrelevant.

A few years later, that haircut aged about as well as a Facebook FarmVille invite.

The fixed wireless industry might have the same problem.

Spend enough time around WISP Talk or operator Slack channels and the pattern is impossible to miss. A vendor launches a proprietary platform. It promises the world. Operators deploy it everywhere. Roughly four years later, the End-of-Life notice drops. Support dries up, interoperability never existed, and migration paths are nowhere to be found. Suddenly you’re staring at a warehouse full of expensive equipment that can’t talk to anything else.

You’re holding boat anchors.

The Proprietary Trap

It’s a cycle we’ve all seen. You build around a platform, the vendor pivots, and because everything is proprietary, there’s no graceful exit. No gradual migration. Just a forced rip-and-replace.

At the same time, the industry has hit diminishing returns on raw speed. In a market increasingly challenged by fiber, marginal performance gains from proprietary platforms don’t carry the weight they once did. There was a period when higher speed tests genuinely differentiated providers and helped win customers. With fewer alternatives, the trade-off made sense.

That environment no longer exists.

Today, a BEAD-funded fiber overbuilder can arrive and match or exceed those speeds regardless. In that reality, short-term marketing wins matter far less than long-term flexibility, interoperability, and cost control. What once felt like a reasonable compromise now carries a much higher opportunity cost. In 2026, the calculus has changed. Ignoring that shift is no longer just expensive. It’s strategic risk.

Acknowledging the LTE Growing Pains

To be fair, many WISPs didn’t choose proprietary lock-in because they loved it. They chose it for survival. Many operators got burned by early LTE deployments that simply weren’t ready for prime time. Whether due to rushed development or premature launches, the market was flooded with hardware that failed to meet its own specifications, leading to massive performance headaches and stranded capital.

This didn’t just hurt bottom lines. It damaged the industry’s reputation. These botched deployments likely contributed to why some grant offices are hesitant to take wireless seriously today. When regulators and bureaucrats see a trail of underperforming networks, it sours the taste for the entire industry.

For many, retreating into a stable, well-supported proprietary ecosystem was the only way to keep the lights on and customers happy. There is no shame in having sought that stability. Those closed-loop solutions provided the refuge that early 3GPP gear lacked. However, as the technology has matured, the core ideas of 3GPP now represent a stabilized, functional path forward. The goal isn’t just to find standards. It’s to find standards-based products that actually work.

The Beauty of Interoperability

The contrast between the proprietary world and the 3GPP standards-based world today is night and day. In the land of open standards, you are the master of your own destiny, not a captive of a vendor’s product roadmap.

Take our own towers at Alabama Lightwave. We run a mix of Nokia AZQC radios and Baicells 436Q radios. In a proprietary world, mixing two brands like this on the same network would be impossible or require expensive middleware. Because they speak the universal language of LTE and 5G, they coexist perfectly. Customers can use Nokia FastMiles and Global Telecom Titan 4000s interchangeably, alongside many other devices available today. No lock-in anywhere.

We sell both Nokia and Baicells equipment through TheEdgeMile.com because we’ve deployed them in the field and trust how they perform. That’s a different position than a distributor who stocks whatever moves.

Core Flexibility

This freedom extends all the way to the core network. The EPC landscape proves that when you stick to standards, you aren’t locked in.

We started on Druid. We experimented with Magma. We ultimately landed on Open5GS-based solutions, and Rapid5GS Pro runs our towers today. Because the interfaces are standardized, changing cores didn’t require a rebuild of the network. The radios stayed in place. We pointed them at a new IP and moved on.

We built Rapid5GS specifically because the private network market needed a core that gives operators real control without the cost and complexity of carrier-grade commercial software. If a platform stops being the right fit, others like Pente’s HyperCore or Hawk Networks’ KeyLTE can be evaluated and adopted without starting over. None of these choices are irreversible when the interfaces are standardized.

That’s the real advantage of standards-based LTE and 5G. They give operators the ability to change direction without starting over. In a broadband market that keeps shifting, that flexibility is what allows networks to endure.

The End of Grant Era Economics

For the last few years, the industry has been living in a distorted reality. Massive government grants like BEAD and RDOF created a buffer. If a vendor end-of-life’d a product line, some operators figured they’d just rip-and-replace with government money. This market interference propped up walled gardens and allowed proprietary solutions to survive despite their anti-competitive cycles.

That era is ending. Grant money is tightening, and unit economics are drifting back toward the harsher reality of the free market. In that environment, repeatedly rebuilding on each new proprietary platform simply isn’t sustainable.

For an independent WISP without private-equity backing, long-term survival in a post-subsidy world increasingly comes down to two paths: fiber, or open standards. In many rural markets, the cost and timelines associated with fiber-to-the-home remain a non-starter. That leaves LTE and 5G, built on open and interoperable foundations, as one of the few practical alternatives.

We design and deploy private LTE and 5G networks on open, standards-based infrastructure—from spectrum planning and RF design through core network configuration and long-term operations. If that approach interests you, you can read more about how we approach private network deployments for telecom operators.

And by embracing LTE and 5G on open standards, operators aren’t just choosing a more flexible access technology. They’re also positioning themselves to participate in the mobility market, opening doors that fixed, proprietary platforms never will.

Castles Made of Sand

The proprietary model is a form of engineered chaos. It locks operators into perpetual capital expenditure in service of the vendor’s roadmap, not long-term system health. When we ignore this reality and keep chasing the latest closed-box platform, we end up building ambitious systems on foundations that quietly shift beneath us, only to watch them erode when the tides turn. Sometimes that tide arrives as an abrupt EOL notice. Other times, it comes via a quarterly earnings call that rewrites the rules without warning.

There was a time when proprietary solutions were the only practical way to deliver reliable service. That time has passed. In 2026, the hardware has matured, the ecosystem has stabilized, and the industry has learned some hard lessons. The foundation provided by 3GPP has proven durable, and the number of viable, interoperable deployment paths has never been greater.

We no longer need to build castles in the sand.

“And so castles made of sand, fall in the sea eventually.” — Jimi Hendrix

Book a network consultation and let’s talk about building something that doesn’t need to be replaced in four years.