I’ve been working in rural counties all over the US and have found that a lot of rural homes are using a fixed 4G LTE wireless product for home broadband. All three big cellular companies have a fixed LTE product for the home. The product typically involves installing a small dish outside of a home that receives broadband using 4G LTE broadband from a nearby cell tower.

The big cellular companies have bombarded the press for the last several years touting how 5G cellular might solve rural broadband gaps. The way the wireless companies price and market these products is a precursor for what they will likely do with 5G (assuming 5G even comes to rural places). I haven’t looked into the LTE products in a while and so I researched the LTE broadband products intended as home broadband. I knew these products were expensive, but I had forgotten how stingy these plans are with broadband.

Verizon. Verizon’s hotspot product has four available pricing tiers based upon the monthly data allowance. The 10 GB plan is $60, the 20 GB plan is $90, the 30 GB plan is $120, and the 40 GB plan is $150. The real cost killer is that Verizon bills additional gigabits for $10 each.

Verizon says that broadband speeds average from 5 – 12 Mbps download and 2 – 5 Mbps upload. I recently talked to a customer using this plan who told me that when a customer doesn’t agree to pay the overage charges that Verizon throttles speeds to a crawl once the monthly data limit has been reached.

T-Mobile. T-Mobile has six hotspot pricing plans based upon the monthly data usage. The 2 GB plan is $10. The 6 GB plan is $25, the 10 GB plan is $40, the 14 GB plan is $55, the 18 GB plan is $70, and the 22 GB plan is $85. Each plan offers a $5 discount for customers who authorize autopay. The killer with this plan is that speeds revert to 3G speeds when the cap has been met. The plans also include unlimited texting.

It’s worth noting that T-Mobile will offer a plan that provides 100 GB of monthly data to qualified students for the next 5 years as one of the promises made to merge with Sprint. I haven’t seen the definition of eligible households, but the company estimated 10 million homes would be eligible.

AT&T. AT&T has two plans. In areas where AT&T is the incumbent telephone provider and accepted CAF II funding, the company decided to provide 4G LTE fixed cellular broadband to satisfy their CAF II requirements. The company had accepted $2.56 billion from the FCC’s Universal Service fund with payments spread over six years. That funding covered 1,117,806 rural homes, providing AT&T with a subsidy of $2,296 per home.

That CAF II product is priced at $50 per month and comes with a 250 GB data cap. AT&T says that speeds are at least 10/1 Mbps (since that was the FCC requirement). The killer with this plan is that customers pay $10 for each additional 50 GB block of data, and payments aren’t capped until a customer spends $200 extra.

Outside of the CAF II areas, AT&T has three hotspot plans. That includes 3 GB of data for $25, 10 GB of data for $50, and 18 GB of data for $75. Extra data ranges from $10 for 1 GB with the $25-dollar plan to $10 for 2 extra GBs with the $72 plan.

Do These Products Solve the Rural Digital Divide? I think not – the core hotspot products define the digital divide. Rural customers who have no other options are paying for some of the most expensive broadband in the world. You have to look at distressed third world countries to see similarly high prices per gigabyte. Recall in looking at these prices that these products are for home broadband – not for cellphones.

• Verizon’s plans range from $3.75 to $6.00 per gigabyte. Additional gigabytes are $10 each.
• T-Mobile data prices range from $3.86 to $5 per gigabyte. After hitting the data cap, the company throttles customers rather than provide more expensive data.
• AT&T hotspots are the most expensive and range from $4.16 to $8.22 per gigabyte. Extra gigabytes on AT&T range between $5 and $10 per gigabyte.
• AT&T’s CAF II product is much more affordable. However, customers can still spend up to $250 per month. Additionally, AT&T charges $100 for installation, which is outrageous considering the company collected $2,296 from the FCC for each of the 1.1 million potential customers. The CAF II money had to have gone almost entirely to AT&T’s bottom line.

What is somewhat ironic is that the cellular companies don’t aggressively advertise the product in rural America, even at these incredibly high prices. I guess that the cellular carriers don’t want to sink any money into rural cell sites or pay for more backhaul, so they are reluctant to sell very much of these products in any one location.