Tag Archives: FWA Cellular broadband

Falling FWA Speeds

Ookla recently published a report looking at broadband speeds being delivered with FWA cellular broadband offered by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

The report includes the chart shown below that tracks the median download speeds of each carrier, by quarter, since the third quarter of 2023.

There are some interesting stories in the chart:

  • At the end of the third quarter of 2023, the median download speed was nearly the same for all three carriers, between 140 and 150 Mbps.
  • Since then, T-Mobile speeds have increased significantly, peaking at 221.7 Mbps at the end of the first quarter of 2025. T-Mobile’s median speeds are now twice the speeds of AT&T.
  • The Ookla blog talks about the fact that speed for all three carriers dropped from the second quarter of this year to the end of the third quarter. AT&T dropped from 114.3 Mbps to 104.6 Mbps. T-Mobile dropped from 221.7 Mbps to 209.1 Mbps. Verizon has the largest drop from 167.3 Mbps to 137.8 Mbps.

Ookla asks the question of why speeds dropped during those two quarters. They expect that some of the drop is due to foliage that slows down cellular signals from late fall until autumn. Foliage is clearly an issue in many parts of the country.

Ookla also asks the question if the networks are experiencing problems due to oversubscription. The three carriers have seen extraordinary growth. At the end of the third quarter of 2023 there were just under 7 million FWA customers. By the end of the third quarter of this year, the companies had just under 14.5 million customers, having added over 7.5 million FWA customers in two years.

It’s clear that FWA customers put a lot of stress on a cellular network. Assuming that FWA customers are the same as other broadband customers, the average U.S. broadband customer used over 640 gigabytes of broadband per month at the end of the third quarter, compared to 17 gigabytes for the average cellphone customer. From a bandwidth perspective, an FWA customer uses 38 times more cell site resources than a cellular customer.

The questions that Ookla is asking are not easily answered because FWA is not a homogeneous broadband product. Customers must be located near a tower to get the fastest speeds, and speeds drop off as the distance between customers and a tower increases. Consider AT&T, which has been using FWA as a replacement for DSL. This likely means AT&T is offering FWA to customers at a greater distance from towers than the other two carriers, in order to provide that copper alternative. That alone could contribute to AT&T’s lower median speeds.

The FWA market isn’t going to remain static. AT&T recently upgraded 23,000 cell sites with the 3.45 MHz spectrum the company acquired from EchoStar. That should cause a big upward spike in AT&T FWA speeds this quarter.

The Ookla report is fascinating. It will be interesting to watch the FWA speeds over time to better understand seasonality, foliage, and the impact of rapid customer growth.

Can Cellphones Capture the Broadband Market?

Linda Hardesty wrote an interesting article in FierceNetwork that asks the question, “What if, in ten years, young people don’t subscribe to fixed broadband at all?” Her story is based on a U.K. research group that predicts that within ten years there will be a lot of young people who will never have subscribed to a landline broadband product. It appears that cellular networks already satisfy the broadband needs for a lot of people in the U.K., and if we believe the industry hype about 6G, cellular networks will get even faster in the future. It’s an interesting question that seems to be raised every few years by those who think wireless is the future.

The article asks if the same might be true for the U.S. It’s not an obvious answer. As the article points out, young people in both countries seem to be satisfied with watching videos on the small cellphone screen. There is not much question that Gen-Z spends even more time on the cellphone than Millennials.

However, there are some big fundamental differences between the two markets. One big difference today is that there are cellular carriers in the U.K. that offer unlimited usage cell phone plans. There is nothing like that today in the U.S. Verizon and AT&T cellular plans have a data cap of around 25 gigabytes, where customers must pay more to use more data. T-Mobile’s plans are marketed as unlimited, but at around 50 gigabytes the speeds are throttled to be largely useless. Most cellular plans also ration the amount of cellular data that can be used when tethered to a computer or other device. While cellphone users might adapt to video on a small screen, they still want to connect to other devices for doing work or intense gaming.

Current U.S. cell phone plans are not aimed at satisfying average home broadband usage. The U.S. national average monthly home broadband usage is 641 gigabytes per month per OpenVault, and that means that most folks won’t be satisfied with using only a restrictive cell phone plan data and nothing else. It also seems likely that the average household usage will continue to grow for the foreseeable future as we migrate more of our lives online.

It’s easy to forget that while young folks in the U.S. use cell phones a lot, most of the usage happens when using WiFi on somebody’s landline broadband connection. Cell phone users benefit when parents, schools, offices, restaurants, and neighbors give them free access to unlimited data. Most cellphone users would burn through the monthly cellular data cap in a hurry if they never connected to WiFi.

But this question raises an interesting question if U.S. carriers might change their cellular packages to provide unlimited data if there is enough demand for the product. Interestingly, that’s exactly what cellular companies are doing when they sell FWA home broadband from a cell tower. People who subscribe to FWA are connecting broadband to computers, TVs, and game boxes and using a lot more bandwidth than used by cellular customers. The FWA plans are largely unlimited, although T-Mobile recently put a 1.2 terabyte data cap on its FWA product.

It would be a giant shift for cellular networks to begin supporting large numbers of customers using unlimited data. Cellular networks were designed to make large numbers of relatively short-duration connections and to be able to hand connections to neighboring cell sites as customers roam. Cell carriers today only allow FWA with the caveat that the carrier can throttle home broadband usage as needed to protect cellphone demand. Providing unlimited usage to large numbers of customers would likely mean a new electronics strategy and probably a lot more cost. For most cell sites, the biggest recurring cost is bandwidth, and a lot of cellular backhaul is leased from others at prices that are not controlled by cellular companies.

U.S. cellular companies have planted the seed of offering unlimited data with the introduction of FWA. There are now millions of customers enjoying unlimited broadband provided by cell towers. It’s not hard to imagine the cellular companies eventually bundling unlimited cellphone data plans for FWA customers.

The future of wireless technology can go in many directions. One trend to watch is the expansion of free outdoor WiFi, which makes it easier to stick with a cellphone. Both the landline broadband and cellular industries seem to be reaching a point of full market penetration, and it’s impossible to predict how the carriers will react to slower market growth. They could retract and only spend capital in locations where new revenues support the spending – or they could go on a mad marketing tear to snag as many customers as possible from other carriers.

The Trajectory for FWA

Mike Dano, in LightReading recently quoted Sowmyanarayan Sampath, the EVP and CEO of Verizon’s consumer business, as saying that Verizon expects to have 4 to 5 million FWA customers at the end of 2024, up from 3.4 million at the end of the first quarter of 2023. Mr. Sampath says that Verizon’s current network can support 4 to 5 million customers, but that the company is assessing how to grow beyond that point – a decision they will make later this year.

Verizon says its FWA growth was a little sluggish at the beginning of 2024, but that sales have picked in March after the company started offering new customers a free Nintendo Switch, the game console that retails for $200 to $300.

Dano also quotes financial analysts at TD Cowen who predict that Verizon will add 888,000 new net subscribers this year while T-Mobile will add 1.3 million more customers this year to add to the 4.8 million customers at the end of 2023. We also can’t forget that AT&T has entered the fray. The financial analysts at New Street Research recently predicted that AT&T will hit a peak of 180,000 new FWA customer additions per quarter by late 2025.

FWA broadband has majorly disrupted the broadband industry. According to the TD Cowen estimates, FWA operators will gain 2.6 million new customers in 2023 while fiber operators will add around 600,000 new customers. They predict that the big cable companies will lose about 1.1 million customers in 2024. That’s a net market change of 2.1 million new broadband customers – down from 3.5 million new customers in 2023.

I don’t know if the TD Cowen estimates include the impact from the end of the ACP program that brought discounts to 10 million landline broadband households. While many of those customers will likely still keep a broadband connection, many of these households got free broadband after applying the discount, and it doesn’t seem unrealistic to think that at least several million households will eventually disconnect broadband without the discount.

FWA broadband has one notable weakness that might define a natural market cap for the product as currently configured. The current version of the product shares bandwidth with cellular customers. Cell sites were not designed to accommodate large numbers of broadband connections that stay connected for long periods of time – and that, according to OpenVault, now use an average of 651 gigabytes of broadband every month. FWA broadband usage has to be eating into the resources at cell sites – and the impact will only get worse as both home and cellular customers use more broadband every year.

I think I’ve already witnessed some evidence of the stresses caused by FWA. I’ve had access to detailed speed test records for entire counties, and I’ve seen FWA customers who test at speeds of 100-300 Mbps down most of the time but who occasionally test at only a few Mbps. The FWA providers all say that they throttle users any time the cell site gets too busy, and I’ve seen enough examples to think this is evidence of severe throttling. That’s a situation that will occur more often as the FWA providers add more customers. Most broadband customers today won’t tolerate occasionally losing all broadband and likely will return to their original ISP if they continue to get throttled.

Mr. Sampath touched on a possible solution to the problem. He says Verizon is exploring the use of millimeter-wave spectrum at cell sites. Both Verizon and T-Mobile are considering C-Band spectrum for FWA customers. Moving at least some FWA customers off the same spectrum used for cellphones would eliminate the biggest weakness of FWA – that it uses the same spectrum that is serving cellphones. As much as carriers like FWA, they are not going to endanger their much larger cellular business – and one has to think that the success of FWA has already degraded cellular quality to some extent.

Interestingly, both Verizon and T-Mobile had originally publicly predicted that they would eventually achieve 15 million customers on FWA. They still have a long way to go to get there. It already looks like Verizon might have tapped into a lot of the households that are choosing FWA strictly due to lower prices. Having to bribe new customers with a new video console is a sign of a market that is already maturing.

It’s clear that FWA growth is probably the most important statistic in the market today since other ISPs are competing for the customers who aren’t opting for FWA. If the overall broadband market is reaching maturity, it gets even harder to predict how any given ISP or technology will perform.

Supporting Rural Cell Towers

I work with a lot of ISPs that own rural fiber. Some rural network owners have been successful over the last decade in providing fiber to the cell sites located near their networks. A few sell directly to a cellular carrier, but most of these connections are sold to an intermediate carrier that bundles together cellular connections across a large geographic area.

This has been good business. Depending upon the bandwidth being purchased for the cell site, the monthly fee for providing bandwidth to a cell tower has ranged from $500 to several thousand dollars per month. That’s good revenue for a rural ISP that mostly serves residential customers, and that doesn’t typically have a lot of higher-margin business customers.

I’m hearing about requests from cellular companies or intermediate carriers to increase bandwidth at cell sites. I’ve had four separate discussions about this from different parts of the country in the last month. This makes a lot of sense. All of the statistics say that bandwidth usage on cellphones is growing at an even faster pace than bandwidth usage for households.

There is another phenomenon driving the recent need for more bandwidth at cell sites. T-Mobile and Verizon have added almost 7 million FWA cellular broadband customers in just the last few years and have gained over a 6% market share of all national broadband connections. AT&T and smaller cellular carriers are also launching the FWA product.

FWA broadband is a major upgrade from the cellular hotspots that have been sold in rural America over the last decade. Hotspots hit the news everywhere when school systems and employers tried to use hotspots to provide home broadband during the pandemic, only to find that the bandwidth available was not adequate to meet the demand. FWA cellular is using the new spectrum that the cellular carriers have labeled as 5G, and this has meant a significant increase in speeds – with T-Mobile and Verizon providing speeds between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps within a few miles of an upgraded cell tower.

These new requests for higher bandwidth create a few issues for local ISPs. Some local networks will have to upgrade electronics to be able to deliver a 10-gigabit connection to a cell site. At the same time, there has been a continuous downward pressure on backhaul bandwidth pricing, and it’s likely that the cellular carriers are going to want multi-gigabit connections at a similar, or even lower cost than what they might have been paying for a gigabit or less today.

The real dilemma is that an ISP that increases bandwidth for an FWA site is enabling a last-mile competitor. ISPs have not worried about competition from hotspots because the speeds are relatively slow, and hotspots have tiny data caps that make them too costly for a household to use in any meaningful way. But FWA cellular is both cheap (in the range of $60 per month) and provides unlimited usage. There is always a significant percentage of customers in any market for whom price is more important than bandwidth –  there is always a market for low prices.

If an ISP provides increased bandwidth to a cell tower, the carrier at that tower might use that bandwidth to capture 10% or more of the customers around the tower. It was one thing to support cell towers when they were used for rural cellphone coverage. But it’s a new equation to be asked to provide faster bandwidth to an ISP that will use the bandwidth to win over local customers.

I’ve been having some interesting conversations with ISPs about this new dilemma. Is the extra revenue from selling bigger bandwidth to cell sites high enough to replace what might be lost from last-mile retail sales? ISPs have never been required to enable competitors to compete against them unless their network was partially funded by a grant. Last-mile ISPs have never thought of cellular carriers as competitors, but suddenly they are.

Part of the answer to the question comes from looking at the likelihood that somebody else will bring the backhaul if an ISP declines to increase the bandwidth. At some cell sites. it might be worthwhile for somebody else to build new fiber or microwave routes to supplement the cell site bandwidth. We are also possibly going to see satellites able to fulfill rural backhaul. The business plan for OneWeb has changed from retail broadband to wholesale backhaul. There are several other satellite companies designing satellite constellations aimed directly at providing cell site backhaul.

I don’t have any easy answer for this, and every local situation is a little bit different. Perhaps FWA competition is inevitable, and maximizing sales to cell sites is a way to offset the coming revenue losses. Most rural fiber network owners have not had to worry much about competition. Every network owner, including those providing fiber broadband, has always seen some customers choose other ISPs. But rural ISPs have never feared losing significant customers. Should a network owner embrace the increased bandwidth sale to towers, or should they drag their feet for a while to push off the time for competition? At what point Do they risk losing backhaul sales to cell sites – since the worst result would be losing both the wholesale and retail revenues?

One of the old truisms of rural broadband is there is almost no real competition once somebody builds a fast rural network. But the advent of FWA wireless and faster fixed wireless radios means that rural markets will have competition, at least in some portion of a network.

Where is FWA Finding Customers?

Several people have asked me where the cellular carriers are finding the millions of customers they are adding to FWA cellular broadband. T-Mobile added 550,000 customers in the third quarter to reach 4.6 million total subscribers. Verizon added 380,000 in the third quarter to reach 2.7 million customers. AT&T is late to the game but says it is now adding 2,000 a week and plans to step this up significantly. Other carriers like UScellular are poised to enter the market.

The new FWA customers have to be coming from somewhere – and there are a lot of possibilities. In urban areas, the customers would have to be coming from cable companies, telco DSL, or fiber. In rural areas, customers would be coming from DSL, fixed wireless, satellite, or cellular hot spots. I’ve not seen any discussion or announcements from T-Mobile or Verizon about where they are gaining customers.

T-Mobile and Verizon together now have almost 6% of all broadband customers using the new wireless product. I’ve seen those companies speculating about growing to a 15% market share, which would mean adding another 10 million customers. That would make FWA collectively the third largest ISP behind Comcast and Charter.

I’ve been doing some digging, but my research is far from scientific. I’ve looked in detail at half a dozen counties using detailed Ookla speed tests to see where the FWA customers live. I looked at a few rural counties with only one or two sizable towns, and I looked at two suburban counties where cable companies serve the large majority of the geography. The first thing I noticed is that speeds are only good for around two miles from a cell tower – that’s not far in a rural area, but the carriers are now passing a lot of customers.

I also noticed in this tiny sample is that there are a lot more FWA speed tests in rural areas than in towns. That makes sense. In many places the FWA product delivers speeds of between 100-300 Mbps download – and for rural customers who have had no decent broadband option, this is a spectacular upgrade option. Upgrading to FWA from a creaky 10/1 Mbps DSL probably feels like the change we remember from going from dialup to DSL. I’ve noticed that there are still a lot of rural towers that have not yet been upgraded to the product, and perhaps those upgrades will provide a lot of the path to adding another 10 million customers.

There are FWA customers in cities and dense suburbs, but the relative penetration of FWA in densely populated areas looks to be relatively miniscule. The FWA sales proposition in urban areas is price. It’s still not unusual to find a 15% market penetration of DSL in cities, and it should be easy to sell faster speeds and better reliability at the same price as DSL. CenturyLink recently said that its rapid drop in DSL is due mostly to FWA.

One place that the cellular carriers are getting the customers is from their own embedded customer base. In many rural counties, T-Mobile and Verizon already have a 2 to 4% market penetration of cellular hotspot customers. These older broadband products delivered whatever cellular speed was available on the rural 4G network – and were exceedingly expensive due to severe data caps. It’s a pretty easy sell for a cellular company to tell customers they are sending them a new receiver that will get faster speeds and that will provide unlimited broadband – but with the small print caveat that bandwidth can be throttled any time that cell phone traffic is heavy.

I know that AT&T is using the product to convert its rural DSL customers. I happened to be in an AT&T store recently and heard them tell a customer that their copper DSL and voice line was soon going to be cut dead and replaced with FWA. The sales pitch to compete against satellite is also pretty easy. The FWA product is faster and costs less than any of the satellite options. Competing against WISPs using fixed wireless is more of a local situation since the quality of WISP broadband ranges from miserable to great.

The big question everybody wants answered is the impact of FWA on cable companies. In the last quarter, the big cable companies collectively added only 8,000 customers, and only Charter grew a little. The big cable companies have made themselves vulnerable due to high prices and in many markets due to reliability. Converting to FWA can almost cut a broadband bill in half. In cities, almost everybody lives within a decent distance of a cell tower – but the big concern for urban FWA is the capacity to support the product. While the cellular carriers love the new FWA product, they still view this as a footnote product in their annual reports. They are not about to jeopardize cellphone quality by oversubscribing fixed broadband customers on networks that weren’t designed to provide continuous broadband connections.

I still have no idea of the extent to which cable companies are losing customers to FWA or fiber. They are certainly losing to both – but the cable companies and their competitors are staying mum on the topic.

The Trajectory of the Broadband Industry

For well over a decade, it was fairly easy to understand the trajectory of the broadband industry. In the residential market, cable companies snagged all of the growth while telcos shrank as customers abandoned DSL. Other technologies like fiber or fixed wireless gained customers but were a blip on the national scale. In the business market, a dozen large companies competed fiercely for large business customers while smaller businesses were stuck with the same technologies used to deliver home broadband. There was no suspense in predicting where the industry was headed from year to year.

But the broadband industry is now in total turmoil. Within a short time, cable companies have stopped growing. Currently, all of the industry growth among big ISPs is coming from FWA cellular wireless. Last-mile fiber networks are being built across the country. WISPs finally have the radios and enough spectrum to be serious competitors.

When I talk about trajectory, I’m not talking about predicting 2024. The challenge is to guess where the industry is headed over the next five years. Who will be the winners and losers over that time? The easiest way for me to think about this is to look at each industry segment.

Let me start with the cable companies. You can’t have this conversation without first acknowledging that Comcast and Charter together have over 50% of all broadband customers today. That puts a big target on their backs because they have the customers that everybody else is chasing. The cable companies have clearly lost the perception war – the general public seems to have accepted that fiber is better than coax. The cable companies got blindsided by the pandemic when millions of people suddenly cared about upload bandwidth, and a lot of people got a bad taste for the cable companies. The companies are now scrambling to implement mid-split technology to boost upload speeds to 100-200 Mbps. Most are talking about implementing DOCSIS 4.0 much earlier than they had originally planned. The big unknown is if these two upgrades will be enough to turn public perception. Cable companies don’t help their case by having the highest broadband rates in most markets that continue to increase each year. The one advantage the big cable companies have is aggressive bundling with low-price cellular.

Fiber overbuilders are now everywhere. Big fiber overbuilders like AT&T talk about achieving a 30% penetration rate in a few years and reaching 40% after 4-5 years. But the telcos also have to overcome a public perception problem since they did such a poor job of customer service over the last decade while pushing the clearly obsolete DSL. Smaller fiber overbuilders don’t have this history and are aiming higher, and have penetration rate goals of 50% and beyond. Fiber gains don’t only come from cable customers, and a lot of fiber gains are from converting the remaining DSL customers. In five years it’s not hard to believe that fiber will have half of the customers in neighborhoods with fiber.

The big unknown is FWA cellular wireless. Already today, this product has picked up all of the industry growth over the last 18 months, and that trend looks to continue for a while. It’s a real mystery where the carriers are getting most of the growth. I can tell by looking at detailed speed test data that a lot of the growth is coming in rural areas where customers within two miles of a cell tower finally have a solid and fast broadband product faster than 100 Mbps. Any gains in cities are probably coming from customers who care most about price – FWA is much cheaper than cable broadband. But over the long run, this technology faces challenges. In rural markets, FWA will compete against faster WISPs and with fiber networks that will be built by BEAD grants. The wildcard for the industry will be the impact of using C-Band spectrum. That is supposedly going to at least triple the speeds – again within relatively short distances from towers. But FWA technology has a big long-term constraint in that cellular networks were never designed to deliver steady-use home broadband. While carriers might love this new income, one would think they are not going to be dumb enough to endanger their cellular customer satisfaction, which is their real source of revenue.

WISPs have a rosier future through the combination of better radios that minimize interference and the use of new spectrum, particularly 6 GHz, which can mean gigabit speeds in ideal circumstances. It’s really hard to predict the trajectory of this sector. In many rural areas, WISPs will be competing against fiber networks funded by grants and operated by highly popular ILECs and cooperatives. But in other markets, WISPs might become the virtual monopoly provider if they can win the broadband grants. That makes it hard to judge the overall trajectory in rural markets. WISPs will always face challenges in urban markets where they can’t serve more than a small percentage of homes and where frequency interference is rampant.

We can’t forget satellite broadband. Starlink has done well by bringing broadband where nobody else would – but that is also going to change due to the rural grants. Starlink’s prices are already a barrier for many potential users. The big unknown in the industry is what Jeff Bezos and Amazon will do. The company finally launched test satellites and might be aggressive with non-traditional bundling and affordable prices.

All of this competition will be happening in an environment where households will use 20% more bandwidth each year. Any technology that has overall bandwidth constraints will eventually feel this pinch. This will affect FWA cellular and satellite broadband the most but can hit any ISP that hasn’t built a robust enough network.

What does all of this mean in five years?

  • Fiber will continue to eat away at cable companies, and in five years, the cable companies might not have a choice and will have to bite the bullet and convert to fiber to compete. It’s hard to envision a future where cable companies don’t lose customers annually for the next five years.
  • DSL will finally die, and its market share will be absorbed by FWA and fiber.
  • FWA companies will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next couple of years. Low prices will always find a market. But if the carriers can’t find a way to guarantee bandwidth at peak times, a lot of homes will lose faith in the product. FWA will see a lot of competition in rural markets. I think the industry will eventually reach a market equilibrium – at some level higher than today’s DSL penetration.
  • WISP’s success will be market by market and will depend upon the other competition and local conditions – the technology will always struggle in places with rough terrain like Appalachia.
  • Satellite broadband will still be the technology of choice for the most remote places. Satellite’s real long-term markets are in the parts of the world that don’t have other good rural ISPs. But Amazon might find a bundling option that will still make the company a serious player in the U.S.

Upgrades for FWA Cellular Wireless

In the recent third quarter earnings call, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg expressed strong support and belief in the future of the company’s FWA wireless broadband product. This product provides home and business broadband that uses the same cellular spectrum used today to provide bandwidth for cellphones.

There is good reason for the company to be optimistic about the broadband product. In only a few short years the company has added almost 2.7 million FWA customers, and most of its broadband customer growth in the third quarter of this year came from FWA. As noted by Vestberg, rapid growth has continued even after the company increased the price of the product by $10 per month.

As I have addressed in several blogs, there are some limitations on the current FWA product. The biggest downside is that the fast speeds advertised for FWA by Verizon and T-Mobile are only available for customers that live within a mile or so of a cell tower. Speeds seem to cut in half in the second mile from a tower and drop significantly by the third mile.

Another drawback is that both Verizon and T-Mobile throttle the bandwidth for FWA any time that cellphone usage gets heavy. In scouring through multiple speed tests, we have found customers who vary between fast and extremely slow speeds – which might be evidence of this throttling.

But Vestberg mentioned a big technology boost that will be coming to the Verizon FWA product. Verizon purchased a lot of C-Band spectrum in an FCC auction in 2021. This is spectrum that sits between 3.7 GHz and 3.98 GHz. The licensed spectrum provides Verizon with anywhere from 140 MHz to 200 MHz of cellular bandwidth in markets across the country.

Vestberg says the company is starting to upgrade busy urban towers with the extra C-Band spectrum. He implied that the upgrades will be coming to other urban towers and some suburban towers in 2024.

He said the C-Band spectrum will double or triple the cellular bandwidth depth in most markets. He said that using the new spectrum for FWA could result in speeds as fast as 900 Mbps to 2.4 Gbps. Like all speed claims made by ISPs, those speeds are likely faster than anybody will see in real life and probably represent theoretical maximums. However, FWA users can expect a big boost in speeds, particularly those living near towers.

I have to assume that Verizon has already built C-Band capabilities into its home FWA receivers, so speed upgrades ought to be realized immediately after an upgrade. A lot of the newest cell phones also already include C-Band capabilities. Verizon seems to have the most aggressive plan for C-Band, but AT&T has started to deploy the spectrum in a few markets. T-Mobile owns C-Band spectrum, but still seems to be hanging on the sidelines for upgrades.

Significant speed increases to FWA can make the product into a potent competitor to cable companies, at least for customers within a close distance of a cellular tower. The FWA prices are far lower than the prices charged by the big cable companies for broadband, and fast speeds can make this a viable alternative.

The first generation of FWA has delivered speeds in the 100-300 Mbps range. That has been fast enough to attract millions of customers. But the first generation product has felt more like a big upgrade to DSL rather than a direct threat to cable companies. But if the current speeds are really doubled or tripled, many households are going to be attracted by the lower prices on FWA. It’s an interesting product to market since the attractiveness for customers is in a direct relationship to the strength of the cellular signal that reaches their home –  an extremely local situation.

FWA Cellular Speeds

One of the most interesting things about getting access to a lot of speed tests is that it provides a way to test broadband issues you always suspected but couldn’t prove. If you can collect enough speed tests, you might find proof of a lot of different things. For example, speed tests might show that a broadband network is slower in the evening than during the night – something that customers have always complained about. Speed tests might show that an ISP delivers speeds that are far slower than what an ISP claims on the FCC broadband maps.

I’ve been trying to understand the speed characteristics of FWA cellular wireless. I’ve been interviewing folks for a few years who have FWA wireless, and they all told me that speeds are fast for those living close to a tower but slower as the distance to the tower increases. For example, the first customer I talked to who was using the FWA broadband from T-Mobile is a farmer who had a T-Mobile tower on his property and got almost 300 Mbps download speeds. He was thrilled with the product compared to the much slower WISP he had been using. But when he recommended the FWA wireless to his neighbors, they received a far different bandwidth product. A neighboring farm a little over a mile away was getting speeds closer to 100 Mbps, which they also thought was good. But some farms further away said that the FWA broadband was too slow.

I heard similar stories from elsewhere, but it’s hard to make any universal statements about the FWA product based on a handful of anecdotes from different parts of the country. I recently got access to enough speed tests to understand the performance of the FWA cellular wireless product.

The map below shows a lot of speed tests from Verizon tower in a suburban county. The yellow dots on the map are the locations of actual speed tests. The colored circles on the map show the distance from a cell tower – with purple showing locations within a mile of the tower, red showing locations between 1 and 2 miles, blue/greed showing speed tests within 2 and 3 miles, and the surrounding white areas at more than 3 miles. I didn’t cherry-pick this particular tower as the best example – there are more than a dozen other Verizon towers in the same county that show similar speed test results. I must note that speed tests are not a prefect indicator of broadband performance, and there might be explanations behind some of the slower readings. But I have to think that seeing this same speed pattern around multiple tower sites is a good indication that this is how the technology works.

This map demonstrates what the farmer told me to a tee. There are some locations close to the tower getting 300 Mbps. Customers just over a mile from the tower are getting slower speeds, with the highlighted ones around 75 Mbps. By the third mile band, speeds have dropped a lot closer to 25 Mbps download, and outside the three-mile circle, speeds drop significantly. There is no easy way to tell if the customers with slower speeds are buying FWA wireless, which uses the spectrum that Verizon labels as 5G, or the older Verizon hotspots that use traditional LTE spectrum.

On the FCC map in this county, Verizon reports two speeds – 300 Mbps or 50 Mbps. It’s not easy to understand how Verizon makes the distinction, but it seems like locations for a fairly good distance around towers are claimed at 300 Mbps.

Somebody who doesn’t understand the FCC mapping rules might think that Verizon is breaking the rules by reporting 300 Mbps speeds in places where actual speeds are a lot lower. But the FCC allows ISPs to report marketing speeds for the FCC maps as long as Verizon is advertising the claimed speeds. But that doesn’t mean that the Verizon FCC reporting is ethical. Customers who might refer to the FCC map when looking for an ISP, or customers that see Verizon advertising are hoping to get something close to the 300 Mbps speed – and many will not.

I have some major concerns about cellular FWA technology related to the upcoming BEAD grants. First, any state broadband grant offices that accept the claimed Verizon speeds in the FCC mapping might not award any grants where a fast FWA speed is claimed. That would be a travesty if folks who can’t get speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps with FWA are denied another broadband option.

It’s also possible that the cellular companies will challenge grants that come close to their towers. I knew this was likely going to become an issue the day that the NTIA said that it considers wireless broadband using licensed spectrum to be broadband for purposes of the BEAD program.

It’s also possible that Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and others will try to win BEAD grant funding using this technology. At least in this county, there are very few customers outside of one or two miles from a tower who can get the 100/20 Mbps required for BEAD grants.

I hope that state broadband offices take a hard look at this. Many of them have purchased detailed speed test data, and they can search around towers in the same manner done above. I don’t think it will take much investigation for them to be convinced that FWA cellular broadband can meet the speeds required for BEAD – but only for short distances from cell towers. Broadband offices should also take note that both Verizon and T-Mobile warn customers that speeds can be throttled any time there is increased demand for bandwidth from cellphones.

I am not busting on the cellular FWA technology. If I was in a rural area without a good broadband alternative, I’d buy this product in a second. But I’d be unhappy if I was hoping for 300 Mbps and got 25 Mbps. What is being deployed today is the first generation of the technology, and I assume that it will improve over time. My only concern is the timing of the rollout of this new technology and how it might negatively affect an already complicated BEAD grant process.