Tag: Fixed wireless

What’s New with T-Mobile’s 5G Fixed Wireless Service

Everyone is in competition with each other for the Super Bowl, not just the players or fans, but the companies whose ads play during the game. While Verizon got Jim Carrey to reprise his role in the “The Cable Guy,” T-Mobile brought back “Scrubs” with actors Zack Braff and Donald Faison singing a duet – to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” – about how great its home internet services are. They also had some hilarious PSA-type ads with the great Dolly Parton, and Miley Cyrus, urging people to think of 5G phones.

Since the Super Bowl, T-Mobile has expanded its 5G home internet service in three states – Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio. This brings the carrier’s 5G Home Internet offering to 62 cities and towns across the three states, with coverage spanning nearly 5 million homes. Overall, T-Mobile says 30 million homes are eligible for its fixed wireless access (FWA)-based service across the country.

Wednesday’s announcement highlighted part of T-Mobile’s strategy to make FWA available in markets where there is little or no choice for traditional broadband. This would certainly give them an edge, if they can make it happen. According to T-Mobile, there are at least 3 million people in these three states who don’t have any access or only have one option for a broadband provider.

In a statement Kentucky State Representative Mary Beth Imes praised the expanded coverage effort, saying thousands more households now have access to unlimited high-speed internet.

“T-Mobile Home Internet has expanded access in Kentucky, bringing our state a real competitive option for broadband where many households are still left without any option or any good option,” Imes said.

In the announcement, Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan emphasized that T-Mobile’s expansion is helping to make broadband access more equitable.

“In Akron, families rely on home broadband now more than ever before,” he noted. “But throughout the pandemic, options for reliable connectivity have been lacking, and for some households, non-existent.”

T-Mobile is charging $50 per month for home internet, as long as you setup with autopay. They guarantee no added taxes or fees, price hikes, equipment costs or data caps. Just like Verizon’s 5G Home Internet, customers can self-install the gateway in what T-Mobile says is a 15-minute process. 

T-Mobile is of course bringing in FWA subscribers mainly from more urban and suburban areas. These are generally areas that already have multiple options for broadband Internet. According to a recent Evercore report however, it’s suggested that areas with few options are where fixed wireless has some of the most potential. Overall, the firm found that fixed wireless speeds from different providers across the U.S. varied widely and that cable or fiber often delivered better performance.

“Outside of urban areas with millimeter wave, cable and fiber are able to offer a superior product to fixed wireless, and we expect that many of the fixed wireless net adds in rural areas will be households transitioning from DSL to fixed wireless where cable or fiber is not available,” Evercore stated.

With that being said, there was a report from New Street Research last month that noted when FWA additions from T-Mobile and Verizon are factored in (which totaled 302,000 combined), cable lost share of the overall broadband market in the fourth quarter of 2021. 

“If this result holds, the last two quarters may be the first time Cable hasn’t taken share in well over a decade,” New Street’s Jonathan Chaplin wrote in a February note to investors.

T-Mobile ended last year with 646,000 home internet customers after adding 224,000 FWA subscribers in the fourth quarter. The carrier’s new goal is to increase its fixed wireless subscribers to 7 million to 8 million by the end of 2025. In comparison, Verizon added 78,000 FWA net additions last quarter, ending the year with a total of about 223,000.

Predictions from LightShed Partners came in last month for 2022, forecasting T-Mobile and Verizon would add 1.8 million wireless home broadband customers this year. This is more than double what they added in 2021. The firm noted spectrum depth as the key to speed and capacity carriers need to play competitively in this home broadband market.

“They have been spending tens of billions of dollars on this valuable asset and now they plan to deploy a ton of it,” wrote LightShed analysts in January.

Some analysts however, such as those at MoffettNathanson, see T-Mobile’s goal as more of a challenge.

“The math of acquiring 7-8M customers from an addressable pool of just 30M is daunting enough – it implies something between 23 and 30% penetration of addressable homes, an arguably absurdly ambitious target,” wrote MoffettNathanson analysts in a December report.

Part of the challenge MoffettNathanson highlighted relates to capacity and aligning FWA subscribers with cell sites or sectors that have the most available, as operators want to make sure more valuable mobile customers don’t have their experience hampered by FWA usage.

“It will be relatively easy to acquire FWA customers initially, when almost all cell site sectors are ‘open,’ but it will get harder and harder over time to match demand to precisely those pockets of supply where the network can safely tolerate loads of this magnitude,” Moffett noted.

Also important to note – T-Mobile places a cap on the number of FWA customers it will take on in addressable markets, and once it hits a certain threshold in an area, closes it off to new customers until someone drops the service.

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Verizon’s CFO Discusses Progress with C-Band & Fixed Wireless

At the beginning of November, we reported about the stop AT&T and Verizon had to put on rolling out their respective 5G C-band services due to FAA regulations. As the FAA continues to work with the FCC on this, Verizon’s CFO Matt Ellis is confident that the delay won’t linger more than 30 days. Ellis, who spoke during Morgan Stanley’s European Technology, Media & Telecom investor conference, added that the parties are going through a bit of a process to get everyone aligned. Both carriers have voluntarily pushed things back from December 5th to January 5th.

Ellis also talked about how this delay hasn’t kept Verizon from staying on track with their other goals. This includes reaching 100 million PoPs with C-band coverage in the first quarter of 2022. This seems it may hold true based on how the company was tracking in 5G coverage at the end of October. 

While on the topic of C-band, Ellis talked up progress on the fixed wireless (FWA) front for both 4G LTE and 5G mmWave (aka 5G Home). When asked if he thought fixed wireless would be a key 5G killer app, he replied, “Yes, it is. We absolutely believe that to be the case.”

In the third quarter Verizon disclosed figures, adding 55,000 fixed wireless customers for a total of 150,000 as of the end of September. Coverage with 4G and 5G FWA stands at 11.6 million homes, and plans to reach 15 million by the end of the year. That number aims to hit 50 million by the end of 2025. Combined with what Ellis described as high-teen millions on the Fios side, it will be close to 70 million premises passed with home broadband in the next few years.

For the mmWave service, Ellis said that Verizon will have over 30,000 sites by the end of 2021 compared to just 2,000 sites two years ago.

Unlike 5G fixed wireless, which was quickly put into play along with its network rollout, LTE fixed wireless services have been more recently determined on a site-by-site basis – and is only available where Verizon has enough excess capacity. Initially launching last year, LTE coverage first focused largely on rural areas. Over the past year, it has grown to include more suburban and urban locations. It’s “seeing good traction,” Ellis noted.

When it comes to LTE, he pointed out that customer premises equipment (CPE) was upgraded over the summer to add support for the C-band, when available. “So those customers who are in those first 46 markets that the C-band will get turned on, will have the opportunity to step up from the 4G Home to the C-band version of that as well.”

Like with Fios, fixed wireless is not limited to residential customers. For example, Verizon is delivering 5G fixed wireless to certain Walgreens locations under a network-as-a-service deal in late 2020 covering 9,000 retail stores. 5G Business Internet FWA service expanded to 57 U.S. cities last month, while 5G Home was available in 60.

During Wednesday’s event Morgan Stanley analysts pointed out that Verizon has been highlighting the idea of being the go-to provider for broadband nationwide and asked Ellis about the potential to bundle home and mobile service thanks to fixed wireless access. He said it expands where Verizon can offer broadband, which right now is mainly restricted to the carrier’s Fios footprint.

“We get to take the ability to provide broadband from being a regional play to a nationwide play, and that’s tremendously exciting when we think of what we can do with that,” Ellis said. “Across the different technologies getting up towards 70 million homes by the end of 2025 we think that gives us the opportunity to play in this space in a way that nobody does so far.” He added, “How we market to our customer base in terms of offering those products together is a significant part of the growth opportunity.”

On a related note, T-Mobile has also gotten into the FWA game, and is targeting service to rural areas with LTE and 5G. In September T-Mobile’s FWA tally stood around 600 locations in the U.S., while its mid-band 2.5 GHz 5G footprint now covers 200 million Americans.

In terms of home broadband getting attention, Ellis referenced the recently signed $1 trillion infrastructure bill that includes $65 billion for broadband. Verizon expects to benefit from this via their fixed wireless services. “What I think it shows obviously is the importance of broadband in people’s lives and access to every aspect of the digital economy,” he said. Verizon’s been building out Fios as part of that “fixed wireless access gives us the opportunity to also be part of the solution there.”

Ellis emphasized that he believes the bill shouldn’t favor a specific technology.

“Let’s let the marketplace determine the right solution in each geographic location,” he said, noting that aside from fiber to the home, fiber to a cell site with FWA service provides a compelling product at a great price for customers as well.

Also top of mind is Verizon’s pending $6.9 billion acquisition of TracFone, which Ellis said is set up to close before the end of the year. There are still two hurdles outstanding, including a vote by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that’s on the agenda for a review vote Thursday, as well as FCC approval.

With the Tracfone deal Verizon is aiming to compete more directly in the prepaid space, where its current presence is tiny compared to main competitors but would jump to the leading position in terms of subscriber figures. Tracfone would bring roughly 20 million customers under the Verizon umbrella, a good portion that are already riding on the carrier’s network under a wholesale deal. For the roughly one third of TracFone subscribers that aren’t already on the Verizon network, Ellis said consumers will get an upgrade while Verizon benefits from cost savings as well.

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