Tag Archives: FWA Cellular

Will FWA Run Out of Gas?

You probably haven’t noticed, but the press is no longer full of articles claiming that FWA cellular broadband is a poor broadband choice for customers. For several years, there was a constant stream of quotes by executives of big cable companies and telcos saying that FWA was a flash in the pan that was only selling quickly because of low prices. They said that FWA performance was erratic and cellular carriers didn’t have enough excess capacity to provide a reliable broadband connection. There were many predictions made that FWA would plateau as word of mouth spread that FWA performance was substandard.

But that plateau hasn’t happened. As you can see in the table below, the recent quarterly growth of FWA has held steady for each of the three major FWA providers. Below the FWA numbers are the overall net new customers of the publicly traded cable companies and telcos. The big telcos have finally turned the corner and are installing more fiber customers than they are disconnecting DSL. All of the big cable companies are losing customers each quarter. Not reflected in these numbers are customers being added by fiber overbuilders, and the growth of fixed wireless and satellite broadband. Even considering the growth of the industry not shown on the table, it’s clear that FWA cellular is still dominating the broadband industry in terms of customer acquisition. FWA cellular will eventually plateau, but it doesn’t look like we are close to that day yet. The FWA carriers got a recent burst when Congress gave the FCC authority to renew spectrum auctions and to consider allocating as much as 800 megahertz of spectrum for 5G usage over the next five years. Leading up to that legislation, cellular carriers had started to beat the “we’re out of spectrum’ drum and claiming that the U.S. was losing the 5G battle to China. That argument worked in the past and seemingly has worked again.

I have to think that a big part of the hope for new spectrum is to support FWA. There is a huge usage difference between a normal cellphone customer and an FWA customer. Various industry statistics show that the average cellphone customer uses a little over 20 gigabytes of data per month, while OpenVault says that the average home broadband customer used 663 gigabytes per month at the end of the first quarter of 2025. Not only do FWA customers use thirty times more data than a cellphone customer, they use it in a very different way, with home and work computers connected to broadband for hours on end, while cellphone data usage tends to happen in shorter bursts.

The cable companies and telcos were not wrong when they said that cell towers weren’t originally designed to do home broadband, but with over 13.4 million FWA customers, it’s clear that the cell carriers have figured out a way to make it work. The one glaring weakness of FWA is that carriers will still cut FWA speeds to near zero any time that a cell site gets too busy – carriers are going to continue to prioritize cell customers over FWA customers. But the carriers are considering dedicating spectrum just for FWA, which would eliminate this issue. That will be a lot easier to do after more spectrum comes onto the market.

I’ve always followed predictions of where the broadband industry is headed. A decade ago, there were zero predictions that cellular carriers would capture a significant portion of the home broadband market. Cell carriers have offered cellular hot spots for many years, but the products weren’t popular because of slow speeds and high prices, with most hotspot plans with monthly data caps nearly identical to cellphones.

Verizon recently said it has a goal of reaching 8-9 million FWA customers by 2030. T-Mobile has a more aggressive plan to reach 12 million customers by the end of 2028. The industry segment is far from running out of gas.

Closing Copper Networks

In a precursor to the headlines we’ll be seeing in the U.S., Telefónica announced on May 27 that it shut off its copper telephone network in Spain. Telefónica today has $41 billion in revenues that include broadband, voice, and cellular business. The company was the legacy monopoly telephone company in Spain, founded in 1924, and still serves a major share of the telecom market.

The company began replacing copper with fiber in 2009 in reaction to a European Union order to unbundle copper networks to allow competition – an order that did not apply to fiber. Closing the copper networks also means the wholesale business has ended for companies that were using unbundled copper access.

The company was able to decommission the first two of its 8,500 exchanges in 2014, and the pace has accelerated since then, with 4,300 exchanges shut in 2024. Telefónica claims to be the first telephone company in Europe to have completed the transition from copper to fiber.

Unlike here, the European Union has strong rules that insist that every dropped copper customer has access to another source of broadband and voice – mostly fiber, but also wireless. The EU allows remote locations to be transitioned to satellite broadband. In the U.S., telcos are supposed to find an alternative for customers but often just wink at the requirement.

AT&T made a formal announcement in January of this year that it intends to get rid of copper everywhere except California by the end of 2029. The company has been quietly decommissioning copper long before that formal announcement. AT&T will likely have a prolonged battle with the California Public Service Commission before it can tear down copper.

AT&T said in its announcement that it will offer an alternate technology to customers – either fiber or wireless. AT&T announced plans at the end of last year to build 45 million additional fiber passings on the same 2029 deadline as killing copper. Cities are anxiously waiting to see if AT&T will really build fiber in the poorest neighborhoods and in places where fiber construction is very expensive. It seems more likely that the company will get 80% fiber coverage in some cities and call it good.

Rural areas are another matter. In rural areas, AT&T will offer FWA cellular broadband as an alternative to copper. But FWA technology has two major shortcomings in rural areas. First, there is zero cellular coverage in huge parts of rural America, and even less coverage when you account for FWA customers needing to be within a few miles of a cell tower. Even close to a cell tower, there is always the question if a given tower has the capacity to accept a lot of new FWA customers. There are already stories in the press of rural customers losing copper coverage with no wireless alternative.

The FCC recently changed rules to make it easier for legacy telcos to walk away from copper networks. These changes were adopted by the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau, meaning they didn’t come to the full Commission for a vote.

One rule change allows a telco to turn off copper wires without having to conduct a test to first see if a replacement technology can take over the functions that were being performed by copper. This rule clarification says a telco can justify tearing down the old network if the “totality of the circumstances” proves that the change is needed. That seems to provide justification for tearing down copper as long as some adequate number of homes in an area will have a replacement.

Another rule change puts a two-year moratorium on telcos for having to disclose and seek public comment about closing copper networks.

Of course, to speed things along even faster, there is a good chance that all rules pertaining to copper networks will be scrapped during the Delete, Delete, Delete process.

Why Customers Choose FWA

It’s been interesting to watch cable companies downplaying FWA cellular wireless. For example, in September, Comcast President Mike Cavanaugh said that FWA wireless is a ‘near term’ issue that is competing for the lower end of the market. CEO Brian Roberts was quoted this year about competing against FWA saying, “Three companies are all simultaneously within a short period of time are all offering a home connectivity product by their own admission a lower speed, more easily congested network.”

And yet, the carriers selling FWA continue to sell at astounding numbers. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have consistently added 900,000 customers per quarter since the second quarter of 2022. The big cable companies have been fighting back by significantly lowering the prices of their slowest bandwidth products, and this seems to be stemming the losses due to FWA. But those lower prices come with a cost with lower margins and average revenues per customer.

I think that what has been missing from the discussion of FWA of how the technology compares to the alternatives. Consider the following table that shows average speed tests for a 12-month period in three rural counties for all broadband technologies. There is nothing unusual about these counties – they are just three places where I happened to recently do some analysis. Each county has a county seat and a few towns with cable broadband and some fiber, but rural areas are largely still not served with any fast broadband.   It’s not hard to understand why FWA is so competitive in rural counties. It’s generally faster than fixed wireless and Starlink, and with generally a lower prices. FWA is being priced at roughly the same level as DSL in many markets.

The big limiting factor for FWA in rural markets is the broadband footprint and good speeds like those shown in the above table are only available within a few miles of cell towers. In all three counties, the FWA providers cover only roughly one fourth of the geographic footprint of the county.

Comparative speed tests are always interesting. Each county is served by a different cable company, and yet each is delivering almost the same average speeds – likely because each is operating similar DOCSIS 3.1 networks.

There are some noticeable difference in these counties that require local knowledge to explain. For example, fiber speed tests are lower in County 2 due to a fiber provider that offers a very affordable 100 Mbps fiber product that pulls down the average speed. FWA speeds are also slower in County 2 due to households still using cellular hotspots from cell sites that haven’t been upgraded to FWA.

Starlink speeds are consistent with the national average numbers I’ve been seeing – but Starlink has the most erratic variance in speed tests with a range of tests between a few Mbps and several hundred Mbps. In the three counties, the speeds on fixed wireless (from WISPs) are relatively slow since the WISPs have not upgraded to faster radios. There are counties where WISP speeds are much faster. The speed that might surprise some folks is DSL. As the copper networks have emptied of customers, the remaining customers are seeing faster speeds than just a few years earlier.

The Trajectory of FWA

In what is bad news for many other ISPs, both T-Mobile and Verizon have plans to continue their aggressive growth of FWA cellular broadband. As a reminder, this is home broadband delivered from cell towers that mostly uses the same spectrum already being used at cell towers for cell service.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have had unprecedented success with this new broadband product since it first launched in 2021. The following table shows the growth in FWA so far this year.In the first two quarters of this year, the three carriers added almost 1.8 million customers, while big cable companies lost almost 500,000 customers, and big telcos saw a net gain of under 50,000 net new customers.

AT&T is the newest provider of FWA service and just getting serious about selling the service in 2023. AT&T does not provide FWA everywhere it has cell customers, and strategically uses FWA, mostly in rural markets, as a replacement technology when discontinuing copper service. AT&T continues to be focused on fiber expansion and has passed far more new locations with fiber in recent years than anybody else.

T-Mobile has been the most aggressive in deploying FWA broadband and now has over 6 million customers. T-Mobile says it’s goal is to reach 8 million customers by the end of 2026, which would require a continued growth of 400,000 new customers per quarter. T-Mobile recently announced longer-term plans to reach 12 million customers by the end of 2028 – which would mean stepping up customer acquisition to an average of 500,000 net new customers per quarter.

Verizon recently announced plans for aggressive FWA growth. The company says it will set a goal somewhere between 8 and 9 million customers by the end of 2027. This would mean average growth in the range of 275,000 to 350,000 customers per quarter – slower than the current rate of growth.

T-Mobile currently has over 1 million customers on a waiting list for FWA. Like Verizon, T-Mobile uses excess spectrum capacity at cell sites for FWA. Each company likely has an algorithm for each cell site to calculate the safe number of FWA customers that can be added without degrading cellular broadband service. Both carriers have said that they can’t justify building cell sites strictly for FWA service and only plan to deploy it at current or new cellular cell sites.

Verizon has been increasing FWA speeds in some markets by layering on C-band or millimeter wave spectrum for FWA. The advantage FWA has today is lower prices, but the product become formidable if download speeds can compete with fiber and cable companies.

If the three companies meet their growth goals, they will collectively have almost 20 million broadband customers in 2028 – almost as big as Charter or Comcast today. This growth is by far the biggest disruption of the traditional broadband industry, with FWA growth taking customers away from all other ISPs.

The real key to these growth plans is waiting to see if the public likes the FWA product and doesn’t go back to faster broadband alternatives. Reaching 10 million customers so quickly is impressive and unprecedented in the industry. But it’s no guarantee that they can grow at the same pace to reach 20 million customers.

 

FWA and the Urban Digital Divide

The end of ACP put the kibosh on the business plans of ISPs working to tackle the urban digital divide. I’m aware of a several ISPs working to bring broadband to neighborhoods where the majority of customers qualified for the $30 ACP discount. These business plans only made sense because a chunk of the revenue was guaranteed by ACP.

While some say that ACP is not yet dead, at this point, it looks like it will take a miracle, or at least a powerful champion in DC, to reinstate something like the ACP. I’ve been brainstorming with communities about alternatives to ACP, and I’m starting to think that perhaps FWA cellular service is the next best alternative.

I’ve had access over this past year to large volumes of Ookla speed tests in different markets, and what I’ve seen is that FWA cellular carriers are successfully delivering speeds of 100 – 300 Mbps within a mile or two of a cell site. I’ve seen neighborhoods on the FCC map where Verizon is now claiming gigabit capability, but I haven’t seen any speed tests yet in those areas to see what that means in real life. However, wireless broadband speeds get a bit wonky in cities where small dead zones pop up in the shadow of hills or buildings that block the signal.

FWA cellular is often the most price-competitive broadband alternative now that ACP is gone. Prices of $50 and $60 per month for unlimited broadband are a lot more attractive that the prices of the big cable companies.

There are network issues with using FWA on any mass scale. Carriers aren’t talking about the network management side of FWA in any detail, but from various corporate announcements it seems like FWA is mostly intended to monetize excess bandwidth capacity at towers. That means that in any given neighborhood, there is some natural cap on the number of customers an FWA carrier is willing to serve to not harm normal cellphone traffic. While carriers don’t want to talk about it, there is a lot of evidence that the wireless broadband signal varies in strength and is not nearly as stable as landline broadband. FWA is not a great technical solution for dense MDU properties and is probably best used for single-family homes and small businesses.

Deploying FWA on a significant scale means making new investments. I can’t imagine that cellular carriers are interested in making investments in infrastructure and marketing costs to sell FWA broadband in low-income neighborhoods. Expanding an FWA network means constructing new cell sites, probably small cell sites, and involves getting fiber backbone to new sites.

But I can picture various kinds of partnerships between a City and cellular carriers that might work. One kind of partnership would be on the infrastructure side. I can picture a City or an ISP looking for a low-income broadband solution and willing to invest in small cell sites and fiber to feed them as part of bringing a more affordable broadband solution to selected neighborhoods.

I can also envision various partnerships on the customer/marketing side. For example, cellular carriers today are involved in numerous wholesale arrangements with companies that repackage and resell services on their network. I can envision a city or ISP willing to buy thousands of bulk FWA connections a month – and with a wholesale discount, they could offer lower prices to low-income homes. I have to think there are many variations of these themes and a slew of possible partnership arrangements.

This is all reliant on cellular carriers willing to enter into a discussion of partnerships. Such partnerships would be obviously good for low-income residents and could help to increase broadband adoption in low-income neighborhoods. This would be good for cities that will benefit by having more residents connected to broadband. This could also benefit the cellular carriers by bringing them new customers and revenues, with somebody else tackling the marketing effort on their behalf.

Broadband Subscribers 4Q 2023

Leichtman Research Group recently released broadband customer statistics for the end of 2023 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than for Cox and Mediacom, which are estimated and now reported together. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US landline broadband customers.

Broadband growth for the fourth quarter is still coming almost entirely from the growth of FWA cellular broadband provided by T-Mobile and Verizon. This is particularly true since AT&T’s smaller FWA growth is buried in its overall numbers. For the quarter, FWA fixed cellular customers grew by 929,000 thousand while telco grew by 28,000 subscribers, and cable companies collectively lost 144,000. The fourth quarter of 2023 might be remembered as the quarter when cable companies started to collectively lose customers while telcos collectively gained customers.

Annual
4Q 2023 4Q Change Change
Comcast 32,253,000 (34,000) (66,000)
Charter 30,588,000 (61,000) 155,000
AT&T 15,288,000 (8,000) (98,000)
Verizon 7,650,000 38,000 166,000
Cox & Mediacom 7,020,000 (15,000) (8,000)
T-Mobile FWA 4,776,000 541,000 2,130,000
Altice 4,517,900 (27,500) (114,100)
Verizon FWA 3,067,000 388,000 1,536,000
Frontier 2,943,000 62,000 75,000
Lumen 2,758,000 (78,000) (279,000)
Windstream 1,175,000 0 0
Cable ONE 1,059,300 1,900 (1,100)
Breezeline 663,286 (8,476) (29,184)
TDS 539,800 7,200 29,800
Consolidated 393,219 6,998 25,761
Total 114,691,505 813,122 3,522,177
Cable 76,101,486 (144,076) (63,384)
Telco 30,747,019 28,198 (80,439)
FWA 7,843,000 929,000 3,666,000

In the telco sector, Lumen continued to shrink and lost 2.8% of its broadband customers in the quarter. AT&T had a tiny loss, and all other telcos saw growth. Surprisingly, the biggest telco gainer in the fourth quarter was Frontier, which is finally seeing its fiber strategy working.

The only cable company with a tiny growth is Cable One, and every other large cable company lost broadband customers in the fourth quarter.

For the year, the big broadband companies grew by 3.5 million customers, and all of the annual growth came from FWA cellular. As expected, T-Mobile FWA passed Altice in size, and Verizon FWA surpassed Frontier in the fourth quarter. Lumen is the biggest loser, having lost 9.2% of its broadband customers in 2023.

Will FWA Wireless Peak Soon?

This almost sounds like a silly question when looking at the recent growth of FWA wireless, where the big cellular carriers are selling home broadband using cellular spectrum. But I find myself having to ask the question after discussing this with some of my peers. Universally, every person that I put the question to dismissed FWA wireless as a temporary technology with no real long-term legs.

The observations I heard about FWA included the following:

  • The product is already oversubscribed, and customers are already getting tired of it.
  • Cell towers weren’t designed to handle all-day broadband connections, and this is going to harm the carriers more than help them in the long run.
  • The speeds aren’t fast enough, and people will tire of the broadband performance.
  • The coverage is spotty and swings from fast to slow during the day.

Interestingly, the numbers seem to be telling a different story. Consider national quarterly broadband growth over the last two years, as shown in the following table. These numbers come from Leichtman Research Group, and they say the big companies represented in these numbers represent about 95% of all broadband subscribers in the country.

FWA

 Big Cable Companies Big Telcos

Total
1Q22

532,000

 482,830 50,350

1,065,180
2Q22

816,000

 (60,289) (87,837)

667,874
3Q22

920,000

 39,035 (136,101)

822,934
4Q22

913,000

 55,527 (95,204)

873,323
1Q23

916,000

 67,472 (21,196)

962,276
2Q23

903,000

 9,566 (61,833)

850,733
3Q23

941,000

 4,777 3,392

949,169
Total

5,941,000

 598,918 (348,429)

6,191,489

Since the beginning of 2022, T-Mobile and Verizon FWA captured 96% of net new customer gains. While cable companies grew by 600,000 over that time, 80% of those gains were in the first quarter of 2022. Since then, the big cable companies have stagnated and collectively added less than 20,000 net new subscribers per quarter. Telcos have continued to bleed customers as they continue to lose DSL customers, but underneath those losses, the telcos are replacing DSL customers with fiber customers.

Some of the observations of FWA I heard ring true. Cell sites weren’t designed for the kind of connections people expect for home broadband. But after seeing this unexpected success, I’m sure that the carriers are working to bolster cell sites. I know that there are a lot of requests floating around the industry asking for faster broadband connections to cell sites. In the long run, accommodating FWA permanently means changing the way that cell sites operate.

It’s also true that the bandwidth is not guaranteed. Both carriers warn customers that FWA broadband might be curtailed any time there is a lot of demand for cellphone traffic. As much as the carriers love this new business, it’s hard to think they will endanger their cellular business. However, a few of the folks I talked to think that’s exactly what they are doing.

The one observation that nobody made to me was that FWA cellular costs less – particularly less than big cable broadband. The standalone list price for T-Mobile FWA is $65 and is $60 for Verizon. Both companies offer a discount for autopay, and Verizon offers an additional $15 discount for existing Verizon cellular customers. Both are clearly trying to grab market share. I saw an advertisement this past weekend for Verizon FWA with a price of $30 guaranteed for four years for existing Verizon cellular customers. In my experience, there are a lot of customers for whom price is the predominant factor.

While my peer group thinks FWA is a flash-in-the-pan, T-Mobile and Verizon predict they will collectively reach 15 million customers, about twice where they sit today. This is clearly the most interesting dynamic in the broadband industry, but I don’t think anybody knows for sure where these carriers are going to top out. But it doesn’t feel to me like they’ve already hit the top of the market.

The Fiber Land-Grab

It’s becoming clear that we are now deep into a fiber land-grab. By that, I mean that companies that overbuild fiber are moving as quickly as possible into markets to build fiber. The biggest ISPs have publicly discussed their plans for building a lot of fiber in 2023. Following are some of the latest projections for 2023:

  • AT&T plans to build past 2 – 2.5 million new passings.
  • Frontier plans to pass 1.3 million new homes.
  • Altice is aimed for 900,000 new fiber passings.
  • Brightspeed is planning on 600,000 new passings.
  • Verizon hasn’t announced a number, but built 550,000 new passings in 2022.
  • MetroNet is aiming for 500,000 new passings.
  • Lumen plans to build 500,000 passings.
  • Consolidated Communications is planning on 350,000 passings.
  • Charter announced plans for 300,000 passings.
  • Comcast announced plans to pass more than 200,000 homes.
  • TDS plans on 175,000 new passings.

This list doesn’t include the numerous smaller companies that are building fiber. The largest among the rest include fiber builders like Bluespeak, Clearwave, Omni Fiber, Surf Internet, WOW!, and Ziply Fiber. I would guess that there are a few hundred other companies with aggressive fiber plans. This also doesn’t even count the fiber being built by over 200 electric cooperatives.

I call it a land grab because these ISPs are all hoping to get to towns and neighborhoods first in order to dissuade anybody else from building fiber. Since most places getting fiber are already served by a cable company, most of this land grab is not going to create monopolies – but these fiber builders all think they can win a significant share of the market away from the cable competitor.

It doesn’t always work out the way that the fiber overbuilders hope. I talked to somebody in Lansing, Michigan who was amazed that there were three different fiber providers in their alley offering fiber broadband. As somebody who builds fiber business plans, I have to wonder about the third company that constructed fiber when there were already two other competitive fiber providers on the poles. Will any of the three ISPs get enough customers to be successful? But most markets are not seeing that kind of competition, although some of the announced plans on the list above must be in markets where somebody else has already built fiber.

This level of fiber construction bodes poorly for cable companies. Every one of these fiber providers will tell you that they will get at least a 30% market share, and most are hoping for 50%. They are all banking on the current public sentiment that fiber is the superior technology compared to cable company coaxial networks. These ISPs almost all have lower broadband prices than the big cable companies.

Of course, cable companies are rushing to fight back by upgrading upload speeds to become symmetrical. You can expect when that happens to see a huge blitz everywhere talking about symmetrical gigabit speeds. Cable companies also compete by offering very low introductory rates intended to win or keep customers from leaving for fiber. But much of the public has gotten tired of that cycle of having to renegotiate rates every few years.

Only time will tell if cable companies will be successful with this strategy. If enough of the public believes fiber is superior, then any cable marketing plan is going to fall on deaf ears for some portion of every market.

Rural fiber land grabs are different because anybody building fiber in a rural market probably will have a monopoly for fast landline broadband. It’s hard to think that many companies will consider building a second fiber network in places with low housing density. The rural fiber builders will likely face competition from WISPs deploying the latest radios. Just like with competition with cable companies in cities, it’s going to be interesting to see who wins that battle. It’s likely going to be a neighborhood-by-neighborhood battle. I suspect local WISPs with good local reputations will fare well against fiber built by the giant telcos or cable companies. On the flip side, local cooperatives and other local fiber builders will likely do extremely well against the giant WISPs. It’s going to be an interesting battle to watch.

I have no idea how Starlink and FWA cellular wireless fit into this battle. Fiber and fixed wireless with the newest radios will both be faster than these two technologies, and the market battle might come down to prices. The next decade is going to be an epic battle for broadband customers, and a boon to ISP marketers.

FWA Mapping and BEAD Grants

There is one mapping issue that unfortunately messed up the NTIA’s count of eligible passings for BEAD, grants and that is going to be a real concern for folks who file BEAD grants. Over the last year, both T-Mobile and Verizon have activated rural cell sites that can deliver home broadband using licensed cellular spectrum that can be 100/20 Mbps or a little faster. According to the way that the NTIA and the BEAD grants determine grant eligibility, these locations are considered as served.

There are several reasons why this is going to be a practical problem in the BEAD grant process. First, the claimed areas claimed by the cellular carriers on the FCC maps are not accurate. Cellular broadband signal strength decreases with the distance between the cell tower and a customer. The easiest way to explain that is with an example. I talked to a farmer in Illinois who has the T-Mobile FWA broadband and is thrilled with it. The T-Mobile tower is on his farm and he’s getting over 200 Mbps download speed. He bragged about the technology to his neighboring farmers. One of his neighbors over a mile away is getting download speeds over 100 Mbps. But another neighbor over two miles away is getting speeds closer to 50 Mbps and doesn’t like the product.

At some future point, the FCC is supposed to require heat maps around each cell site to more accurately show the actual speeds that can be delivered, But for now, T-Mobile and Verizon are typically claiming speeds of 100/20 Mbps or faster for a sizable area around each cell site. This speed is true for the folks close to the tower, but at the outer fringe of each claimed circle are customers who are not able to receive 100/20 Mbps broadband. Those areas should be eligible for BEAD grant funding. I have no idea how State Broadband offices are going to deal with this. Any Grant office that decides to stick with the FCC maps will be condemning small pockets of folks to have worse broadband than everybody around them.

This is also another problem to deal with for an ISP seeking BEAD grants. I’ve described in the past how RDOF carved up the unserved and underserved areas in many counties into a jumbled mess, and FWA cellular coverage makes it that much harder to put together a BEAD serving area that makes both engineering and financial sense.

There is a more subtle issue that is even more troubling. The cellular carriers have no intention of serving everybody within the range of a cell site. There are constraints on the number of people they are willing to serve. This is similar to the constraints that Starlink has with serving too many people in a given small geographic area. This makes it hard to understand why NTIA rushed to define this technology as qualifying as served broadband. The willingness and ability to serve everybody ought to be one of the most prominent factors when declaring a technology to be creating served areas.

Even worse, T-Mobile says in the terms of service that it reserves the right to throttle usage on the FWA service. The bread and butter product for cellular companies is people with cell phones, and they are giving those customers priority access to the bandwidth at each tower. Any time cellular traffic demand gets too high, the usage to FWA customers will be restricted. That may not be a problem for low-population cell towers – but customers at any tower that has this restriction are going to be unhappy if broadband slows to a crawl in the evening.

My final issue with FWA cellular technology is that is expanding rapidly. Soon, it won’t just be Verizon and T-Mobile deploying the technology. UScellular, DISH, and AT&T are likely to start popping up in rural areas. I’ve been scratching my head wondering how State Grant offices and ISPs are going to deal with the technology if it’s activated during the grant review process. Cellular companies have every motivation in the world to intervene in grant applications and declare that areas are served and ineligible for grants. If the FWA carriers are allowed to make this claim for new cell sites, I can foresee numerous ISPs walking away from BEAD applications if the serving areas get carved up too badly.

This is a new technology, and, in my opinion, the NTIA rushed to accept these areas as served. The technology is so new that there was almost nobody served with cellular FWA back when the IIJA legislation enabled the BEAD grants. For the reasons I’ve discussed, it makes no sense to give cellular companies little broadband monopolies around their cell sites.

Good Enough Broadband

I’ve lately been asked by several local politicians why they should pursue getting grant funding for their county since Starlink satellite and FWA cellular broadband seem like good broadband alternatives that are already here today. It’s a reasonable question to ask since they have likely heard from rural households that are happy with both technologies. The question usually includes some degree of wishful thinking because the officials want to be able to tell constituents that good broadband is already available and that the broadband gap has been solved.

I hate to tell them that these technologies are not a good permanent solution. At the same time, I stress that they should be promoting these technologies to make sure that folks know there are some better alternatives available today than other extremely slow broadband options. But I don’t think either of these technologies is a long-term broadband solution.

FWA cellular broadband is home broadband that is delivered by cellular companies from cellular towers. It uses the same technology as the broadband delivered to cellphones, with the only real difference being that there is an in-home receiver that can be used for home broadband.

The primary problem with thinking of FWA cellular as a permanent solution is the reach of the technology. Somebody living right under a tower might be able to get 200 Mbps broadband today, and for somebody who has been suffering with rural DSL or cellular hotspots, this is an amazing upgrade. But the strong cellular service doesn’t carry far from a given tower. Speeds drop rapidly with the distance between a customer and the cell tower. A customer living a mile away from a tower might see maximum speeds of 100 Mbps, but after that, speeds drop precipitously until the product looks like other current slow broadband technologies.

The distance issue wouldn’t be a big problem if rural counties were peppered with cell towers – but most rural counties don’t have nearly enough towers to support this technology. In fact, in most rural counties I’ve worked in, a lot of the county doesn’t have good enough cellular coverage for voice calls. There doesn’t seem to be any mad rush to build new towers to support FWA – and I wouldn’t expect a cellular carrier to want to be on a tower that might only see a few dozen potential customers.

A final issue with FWA is that cellular carriers give priority to cell phones over home broadband. If cellphone traffic gets heavy, then the carriers will throttle the FWA speeds. This is probably less of an issue in a rural area than in a city, but it means that the broadband is not fully reliable.

Satellite broadband is also not a great long-term solution for several reasons. Starlink has already said that it will only serve some fixed number of customers in a given geographic area – a number it won’t disclose. That makes sense to any network engineer because the bandwidth from a single satellite overhead is shared by all homes using the service. This means that if too many households try to use a satellite at the same time that broadband speeds will bog down. Starlink is never going to be willing to serve all of the rural customers in a county – when it reaches it’s target customers it won’t sell more connections.

The other issue with Satellite broadband is that customers need a great view of the sky. Homes located amidst trees or near hills or mountains may not be able to get the service at all or get a slowed connection.

The final issue with both technologies is the speed being delivered. FWA is most typically today delivering only 50-100 Mbps to most households that are within range of a tower. The speed tests for Starlink show a similar range between 50-150 Mbps. These are amazing speeds for a home with no broadband alternatives. But these speeds are already at the low end of acceptable broadband today – particularly since these technologies have a much higher latency than fiber.

In twenty years, we’ve grown from DSL and cable modems that delivered 1 Mbps to fiber technology today that can deliver multiple gigabit speeds. There are those that claim that the fast speeds are just marketing gimmicks, but I’m hearing from more households over time that need the faster speeds. The reality of the marketplaces is that technologies will spring up to take advantage of faster broadband. We’re already seeing 8K TVs today, and telepresence should be here in the near future. A rural customer receiving 50-100 Mbps will be locked out of future faster applications.

Any county that decides not to pursue the grants to get faster broadband will regret the decision in a decade when neighboring counties have blazingly fast broadband and are the places where folks will want to live. We’ve learned that fast home broadband now equates to economic development due to the work-at-home phenomenon. I worked with a county recently where 30% of the homes include at least one person working full time from home. That means higher incomes which translates into local prosperity.

I really like both of these technologies, and I recommend them to rural folks all of the time. But these are not the broadband solution that a county needs for long-term prosperity.