Sprint and T-Mobile just filed a lengthy document at the FCC that describes the benefits of allowing the two companies to merge. This kind of filing is required for any merger that needs FCC approval. The FCC immediately opened a docket on the merger and anybody that opposes the merger can make counterarguments to any of the claims made by the two companies.

The two companies decided to highlight a claim that the combined Sprint and T-Mobile will be able to roll out a 5G network that can compete with home broadband. They claim that by 2024 they could gain as much as a 7% total market penetration, making them the fourth biggest ISP in the country.

The filing claims that their 5G network will provide a low-latency broadband product with speeds in excess of 100 Mbps within a ‘few years’. They claim that customers will be able to drop their landline broadband connection and tether their home network to their unlimited cellular data plan instead. Their filing claims that the this will only be possible with a merger. I see a lot of holes that can be poked into this claim:

Will it Really be that Fast? The 5G cellular standard calls for eventual speeds of 100 Mbps. If 5G follows the development path of 3G and 4G, then those speeds probably won’t be fully met until near the end of the next decade. Even if 5G network can achieve 100 Mbps in ideal conditions there is still a huge challenge to meet those speeds in the wild. The 5G standard achieves 100 Mbps by bonding multiple wireless paths, using different frequencies and different towers to reach a customer. Most places are not receiving true 4G speeds today and there is no reason to think that using a more complicated delivery mechanism is going to make this easier.

Cellphone Coverage is Wonky.  What is never discussed when talking about 5G is how wonky all wireless technologies are in the real world. Distance from the cell site is a huge issue, particular with some of the higher frequencies that might be used with 5G. More important is local interference and propagation. As an example, I live in Asheville, NC. It’s a hilly and wooded town and at my house I have decent AT&T coverage, but Verizon sometimes has zero bars. I only have to go a few blocks to find the opposite situation where Verizon is strong and AT&T doesn’t work. 5G is not going to automatically overcome all of the topographical and interference issues that affect cellular coverage.

Would Require Significant Deployment of Small Cell Sites. To achieve the 100 Mbps in enough places to be a serious ISP is going to require a huge deployment of small cell sites, and that means the deployment of a lot of fiber. This is going to be a huge hurdle for any wireless company that doesn’t have a huge capital budget for fiber. Many analysts still believe that this might be a big enough hurdle to quash a lot of the grandiose 5G plans.

A Huge Increase in Wireless Data Usage. Using the cellular network to provide the equivalent of landline data means a magnitude increase in the bandwidth that will be carried by the cellular networks. FierceWireless along with Strategic Analytics recently did a study on how the customers of the major cellular companies use data. They reported that the average T-Mobile customer today uses 18.4 GB of data per month with 5.3 GB on the cellular network and the rest on WiFi. Sprint customers use 18.2 GB per month with 4.4 GB on the cellular networks. Last year Cisco reported that the average residential landline connection used over 120 GB per month – a number that is doubling every three or four years. Are cellular networks really going to be able to absorb a twenty or thirty times increase in bandwidth demand? That will require massive increases in backhaul bandwidth costs along with huge capital expenditures to avoid bottlenecks in the networks.

Data Caps are an Issue.  None of the cellular carriers offers truly unlimited data today. T-Mobile is the closest, but their plan begins throttling data speeds when a customer hits 50 GB in a month. Sprint is stingier and is closer to AT&T and Verizon and starts throttling data speeds when a customer hits 23 GB in a month. These caps are in place to restrict data usage on the network (as opposed to the ISP data caps that are meant to generate revenue). Changing to 5G is not going to eliminate network bottlenecks, particularly if we see millions of customers using cellular networks instead of landline networks. All of the carriers also have a cap on tethering data – making it even harder to use as a landline substitute – T-Mobile caps tethering at 10 GB per month.

Putting it all into Context. To put this into context, John Legere already claims today that people ought to be using T-Mobile as a landline substitute. He says people should buy a multi-cellphone plan and use one of the phones to tether to landline. 4G networks today have relatively high latency and 4G speeds today can reach 15 Mbps in ideal conditions but are usually slower. 4G also ‘bursts’ today and offers faster speeds for the first minute or two and then slows down to a crawl (you see this when you download phone apps). I think we have to take any claims made by T-Mobile with a grain of salt.

I’m pretty sure that concept of using the merger to create a new giant ISP is mostly a red herring. No doubt 5G will eventually offer an alternative to landline broadband for those homes that aren’t giant data users – but it’s also extremely unlikely that a combined T-Mobile / Sprint could somehow use 5G cellular to become the fourth biggest ISP starting ‘a few years from now’. I think this claim is being emphasized by the two companies to provide soundbites to regulators and politicians who want to support the merger.