T-Mobile announced the start of a trial for a fixed wireless broadband product using LTE. The product is being marketed as “T-Mobile Home Internet”. The company will offer the product by invitation only to some existing T-Mobile cellular customers in “rural and underserved areas”. The company says they might connect as many as 50,000 customers this year. The company is marketing the product as 50 Mbps broadband, with a monthly price of $50 and no data cap. The company warns that speeds may be curtailed during times of network congestion.
The company further says that their ultimate goal is to offer speeds of up to 100 Mbps, but only if they are allowed to merge with Sprint and gain access to Sprint’s huge inventory of mid-range spectrum. They said the combination of the two companies would enable them to cover as many as 9.5 million homes with 100 Mbps broadband in about half of US zip codes.
There are positive aspects the planned deployment, but also a number of issues that make me skeptical. One positive aspect is that some of the spectrum used for LTE can better pass through trees compared to the spectrum used for the fixed wireless technology that is being widely deployed in the open plains and prairies of the Midwest and West. This opens up the possibility of bringing some wireless broadband to places like Appalachia – with the caveat that heavy woods are still going to slow down data speeds. It’s worth noting that this is still a line-of-sight technology and fixed LTE will be blocked by hills or other physical impediments.
The other positive aspect of the announced product is the price and lack of a data cap. Contrast this to the AT&T fixed LTE product that has a price as high as $70 along with a stingy 160 GB monthly cap, and with overage charges that can bring the AT&T price up to $200 per month.
I am skeptical of a number of the claims made or implied by the announcement. The primary concern is download speeds. Fixed LTE will be the same as any other fixed wireless product and speeds will decrease with the distance of a customer from the serving tower. In rural America distances can mount up quickly. LTE broadband is similar to rural cellular voice and works best where customers can get 4 or 5 bars. Anybody living in rural America understands that there are a lot more places with 1 or 2 bars of signal strength than of 4 or 5 bars.
The 50 Mbps advertised speed is clearly an ‘up-to’ speed and in rural America it’s doubtful that anybody other than those who live under a tower could actually get that much speed. This is one of the few times when I’ve seen AT&T advertise truthfully and they market their LTE product as delivering at least 10 Mbps speed. I’ve read numerous online reviews of the AT&T product and the typical speeds reported by customers range between 10 Mbps and 25 Mbps, with only a few lucky customers claiming speeds faster than that.
The online reviews of the AT&T LTE product also indicate that signal strength is heavily influenced by rain and can completely disappear during a downpour. Perhaps even more concerning are reports that in some cases speeds remain slow after a rain due to wet leaves on trees that must be scattering the signal.
Another concern is that T-Mobile is touting this as a solution for underserved rural America. T-Mobile has far less presence in rural America than AT&T and Verizon and is on fewer rural cellular towers. This is evidenced by their claim that even after a merger with Sprint they’d only be seeing 9.5 million passings – that’s really small coverage for a nationwide cellular network. I’m a bit skeptical that T-Mobile will invest in connecting to more rural towers just to offer this product – the cost of backhaul to rural towers often makes for a lousy business case.
The claim also says that the product will have some aspects of both 4G and 5G. I’ve talked to several wireless engineers who have told me that they can’t see any particular advantage for 5G over 4G when deploying as fixed wireless. A carrier already opens up the available data path fully with 4G to reach a customer and 5G can’t make the spectrum perform any better. I’d love to hear from anybody who can tell me how 5G would enhance this particular application. This might be a case where the 5G term is tossed in for the benefit of politicians and marketing.
Finally, this is clearly a ploy to keep pushing for the merger with Sprint. The claim of the combined companies being able to offer 100 Mbps rural broadband has even more holes than the arguments for achieving 50 Mbps. However, Sprint does have a larger rural presence on rural towers today than T-Mobile, although I think the Sprint towers are already counted in the 9.5 million passings claim.
But putting aside all my skepticism, it would be great if T-Mobile can bring broadband to any rural customers that otherwise wouldn’t have it. Even should they not achieve the full 50 Mbps claim, many rural homes would be thrilled to get speeds at half that level. A wireless product with no data caps would also be a welcomed product. The timing of the announcement is clearly aimed at promoting the merger process with Sprint and I hope the company’s deployment plans don’t evaporate if the merger doesn’t happen.
That seems like a giant improvement over satellite broadband, and if I was Hughes or Viasat, I’d be hoping that is vaporware and never makes it to market. Viasat reports ARPUs >$75 these days despite 100 GB throttling thresholds even in their highest value plans. If T-Mobile did come to market with in-line speeds, no caps, and basically 1/2 the price, I think there would tons of demand.
I think wireless solutions like this are the only legitimate possibility for rural broadband. DSL improvements/extensions and fiber greenfields seem too costly and/or complicated to deploy and satellite has too many shortcomings.
The big question for T-Mobile and everybody else is if the company would really make the needed investments to provide this service in low-density rural areas. They are making that claim now, but they are trying to influence the FCC to support their merger with Sprint.
It’s a far different thing to construct new rural towers and to somehow build the fiber or pay for expanse backhaul to those towers. There are a lot of places where the business case doesn’t pencil out.
How do you think the WISP players have justified the business case? If you look at the Internet Access Services reports from the FCC, the Fixed Wireless line item is by far the fastest growing part of the market, from 810k subs in June-2013 to 1245k in June-2017, an 11% CAGR. Granted, only ~33% of these subs have >10 mbps down and >1 mbps up, but that’s up from ~18% at those thresholds in 2014, so we are seeing progress.
If we got a big Telco like T-Mobile in there with their branding and network capabilities, it seems like they could probably grow subs much faster and in more capital efficient ways. I must be missing something.
I wonder if you even in a rural area? Where I live rhe only cable internet is monopolized, anybody else has to be via satellite, or have my phone double as a mobile hotspot (and speeds aren’t always great). Many more remote rural areas are still 2G and modem only! All these companies talking about rolling out 5G plans when huge swaths of this country still can’t even get beyond 3G speeds.