I’ve written a lot over the last year about the unprecedented success of FWA wireless being sold by cellular carriers. By the end of the first quarter of this year, T-Mobile and Verizon had accumulated 8.6 million customers nationwide on FWA cellular home broadband. In the first quarter, T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T added 869,000 FWA customers, while large telcos barely grew, and large cable companies are losing customers. This is an amazing success for a product that was just launched in 2021. The combined FWA customers represent 7% of the entire U.S. broadband market, and if FWA was a single ISP, it would now be the fourth largest ISP in the country behind Comcast, Charter, and AT&T.

The big cable companies have been downplaying the success and capabilities of FWA, as I documented in a recent blog. They commonly characterize FWA as too slow and inconsistent. Unfortunately for the big cable companies, there are improvements to FWA technology on the horizon that will strengthen the FWA broadband.

One trend is the increased deployment of C-Band and other mid-spectrum which is increasing the overall bandwidth capabilities of cell towers. For example, Verizon is sitting on anywhere from 140 MHz to 200 MHz of cellular spectrum in most markets across the country. That’s enough spectrum to double or triple Verizon’s cellular bandwidth depth in most markets. Hans Vestberg, the CEO of Verizon Wireless says that the C-Band alone could boost speeds for FWA to speeds between 900 Mbps and 2.4 Gbps. While most speed claims by ISPs are exaggerated, even a partial boost would greatly enhance the marketability for Verizon FWA. The first generation of FWA is delivering speeds in the 100-300 Mbps range, and that has been enough to attract millions of customers. If the current speeds are doubled or tripled, many households are going to be attracted by the lower prices on FWA.

One of the biggest limitations of FWA is the number of customers that can be served from a single cell site. I saw where Nokia said that with today’s technology, an FWA provider can typically handle 80 users on a 100 MHz swath of spectrum or deliver 200 GB of data per site per hour. Both Nokia and Samsung are working on technology improvements that could double the capacity to deliver 400 GB per cell per hour by 2025.

This will come from several technology improvements. First is an improvement in multi-use MIMO antennas that will allow for 16 layers of data transmission, up from 4 layers deployed in today’s antennas. The vendors also will begin introducing beamforming technology. This was one of the original promises of the upgrade to 5G that allows a cell site to aim a transmission more directly at specific users. Finally, there will have to be an upgrade in customer receivers to utilize the faster MIMO antenna arrays.

Another big upgrade to FWA might be deployed in major urban downtowns. Verizon recently demonstrated a trial in downtown Austin, Texas where the company was able to use rooftop transmitters to serve 15-20 customers in a nearby high rise building. The current test used C-Band spectrum, but Verizon says it will soon be able to use millimeter wave spectrum in the urban environment. This will not only allow for fast broadband speeds, but FWA customers provisioned this way will not be competing with the spectrum used for cellphones.

Cellular FWA is already a disruptive technology that is forcing big cable companies to lower rates – at least by offering special deals to keep customers. The potential trajectory for FWA skyrockets if speeds can be made competitive with cable broadband, and if the cellular carriers can serve more customers per cell site.

The current primary weakness of FWA is a cap on the number of customers that can be served from a given transmitter. This will limit FWA in urban areas for now. But at some point, the technology might reopen the idea of the deployment of small neighborhood cell sites – something that was promised but that never happened. If cellular carriers fully embrace better FWA, it is going to become a major player in the broadband market. That’s a big if for now since cellular carriers have whacked capital spending plans.