A New Rural Broadband Product?

Verizon announced a new wireless data product that raises a few questions for me. Verizon announced the ‘LTE Home Internet’ product on this web page. The product is easily explained. Verizon will be delivering unlimited data using the cellular 4G LTE network. Customers must buy a receiver from Verizon for $240, but the company is offering a $10 discount for 24-months which returns the cost of the box over two years. The product is $40 per month for a household that is buying a Verizon cellular product that costs at least $30 per month. Non-Verizon wireless customers pay $60 per month. There is free tech support for setup issues for 30-days, implying that tech support will entail a fee after that.

Verizon touts the product as delivering 25 Mbps download speeds, with bursts as high as 50 Mbps. Verizon is launching the product in three markets – Savannah, GA, Springfield, MO, and the Tri-cities area at the area near the borders of Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky.

The first question raised is if this product is intended to replace Verizon’s rural hotspot product, marketed as Verizon Jetpack. The Verizon announcement says, “Verizon will expand home Internet access to customers outside the Fios and 5G Home footprints, expanding home connectivity options to rural areas.”, which implies that this is a replacement for the current rural 4G hotspot product. If so, this would be a drastic repricing for rural LTE broadband.

The Jetpack hotspot is widely used in rural America where there are no other broadband alternatives. From what I can see, the Verizon hotspot is the most expensive broadband in the country and is billed at data rates similar to normal cellular plans. The Jetpack 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 price killer is that Verizon bills additional gigabytes at $10 each. I’ve talked to rural households that spend $500 or per month or more for the hotspot plan.

The release of the new product caught the industry by surprise and there was little or no buzz that this was coming. The big question that those living in rural America will have is if Verizon will offer this as an alternative to the Jetpack product. Is Verizon planning to move customers from plans that cost hundreds of dollars per month to a plan that offers unlimited data for $40 to $60? If so, then this is great news for rural America.

My second question concerns data speeds. Verizon advertises the existing Jetpack product as having from 5 to 12 Mbps download and 2 to 5 Mbps upload. However, the current plan comes with a warning that the product only works where Verizon has a ‘strong’ data signal. I’ve talked to a number of households that say that the Jetpack product is only delivering a few Mbps. Rural LTE data speeds are reliant upon two factors – how close a customer is to a cell tower, and the underlying strength of the broadband feeding the tower.

I wonder if the new product will be any faster? There is a chance that it can be faster if the new device utilizes more frequency bands than the old hotspot receiver. But cellular speeds, in general, get weaker with distance from a cellular tower, and folks that are more than a mile or two from a tower are not likely to get the touted 25 Mbps speeds on the new product.

The cynic in me suspects that Verizon will only activate this product near markets where they have faster broadband products. This would be a good fill-in product for low-bandwidth homes in neighborhoods served by FiOS or the new fiber-to-the-curb FWA product. This is not a bad broadband product for a home that only reads emails and watches a single stream of video – but this product would bog down quickly if used to support multiple simultaneous users.

I doubt that the average urban broadband customer appreciates the misery of homes using the Jetpack hotspot. Data use is metered and it cost $10 of broadband to watch a movie. Families with kids using the hotspot have a constant fight to keep them off the Internet. I hope my gut feeling is wrong and that Verizon will introduce this everywhere and toss out the hotspot product. Even if this product doesn’t bring faster data speeds to rural homes, the pricing and the ability to use unlimited data would be a welcome relief to homes using the Jetpack hotspot. It’s possible that this product is Verizon’s response to T-Mobile’s promised rural 5G product, but we’ll have to wait to see where this is made available before getting too excited about it.