Tag Archives: T-Mobile

Monopsony in the Wireless Labor Market

NATE, the Communications Contractors Association, recently sponsored a report by the Brattle Group titled Market Failure in the Wireless Communications Infrastructure Service Industry. The report describes how the three national mobile networks (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) dominate the labor market for wireless contractors in a way that is undermining the development and retention of the workforce for this critical infrastructure.

The Brattle report calls the situation a monopsony. That is an economic term for a market where a buyer, or a small universe of buyers, has significant market power over vendors who serve the industry. Brattle believes the term applies since the three big cellular carriers collectively control 97% of the cellular market. The contractor market that sells labor to the carriers is comprised of numerous small companies.

The Brattle report describes how the three carriers collectively harm the contractor industry. The three carriers dictate the prices they are willing to pay for service. Contractors complain that the prices offered don’t account for local issues like labor rates, terrain, and weather. 80% of the contractors that responded to a Brattle survey say that prices offered by the carriers don’t cover their costs. The rates don’t cover costs like warehousing of materials, third-party compliance, or training costs for technicians.

The report also shows some interesting graphs that show that the carriers are slow to pay, further adding to the cost of working with them. They have charts that contrast the carriers and show that Verizon pays 75% of invoices within 30 days, while T-Mobile only pays 17%, and AT&T pays 15%. AT&T doesn’t pay more than 45% of its invoices for more than 60 days. Slow payments put a lot of pressure on contractors that must meet payrolls.

The behavior of the carriers is having a big impact on the contractor industry. 54% have downsized during the past three years. A lot of contractors have exited the market and are looking for work outside the cellular market. Attrition of knowledgeable technicians is killing institutional knowledge. The contractors fear that they won’t be able to respond to emergencies or support any effort in a few years to deploy 6G networks.

The Brattle report does not accuse the three big carriers of collusion but says that the desire of each to drive down operating costs is having the same impact as if they were colluding. The report warns that the industry is seeing a noticeable decline in institutional capacity. It takes time and on-the-job experience to train tower climbers – this is not a position that can be quickly ramped up. They warn that loss of experienced tower climbers is not only a concern for the industry but is a national security concern.

The report makes an interesting comparison to another monopsony industry, the companies that build airplanes. The airline industry has learned that it is most efficient if it pays enough to keep experienced workers, because that significantly reduces the time needed to build a new airplane.

The report believes that corrective action is needed. Brattle doesn’t know the best way to fix the problem, which could be done through policy, regulation, or the carriers deciding to change their practices.

This situation is a big contrast to the fiber construction industry because there are hundreds of companies building fiber, which creates significant competition to find a contractor for a project. However, there is a danger after the big spending on grants is completed that the number of companies building new fiber networks will shrink to be similar to the wireless industry.

A Converged Carrier Market?

T-Mobile made financial news recently when a KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst downgraded the long-term outlook for T-Mobile stock and said the company is “underweight”. Press coverage quoted the analyst saying, “We think [T-Mobile] is fiber deficient in a converged/bundled world”.

We’ve been headed towards the industry that is dominated by a handful of converged telecom providers, and the comments from this analyst show that day is probably here. The analyst’s comments come from comparing T-Mobile with the other giant converged companies that offer broadband and wireless, specifically AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter/Cox.

It’s curious why the analyst dinged T-Mobile because the company is profitable and successful. In the latest financial report for the second quarter of 2025, the company reported $17.4 billion in customer revenues, up 6% year-over-year. Net income was $3.2 billion, the highest-ever for the company and up 10% year-over-year. Net cash from operations was $7 billion, up 27% year-over-year. Adjusted free cash flow was $4.6 billion, up 4% year-over-year.

T-Mobile was criticized because the analyst believes that the most successful big companies will be those that lock up customers with a bundle of broadband and wireless. That seems to mean that the companies with the most gigabit passings will be the ultimate winners in the market. T-Mobile is expected to have about 15 million fiber passings by 2030. That pales behind the 50 million passings expected by Verizon by 2020 or the 60 million planned by AT&T by 2023. Charter passes 57 million homes today and will be adding 7 million homes when it closes on the merger with Cox. Comcast says it will have 62.5 million passings by 2023. T-Mobile will clearly have the smallest fiber footprint.

How are the other big four converged companies doing with bundling? Comcast had 8.5 million cellular customers at the end of 2Q 2025 compared to 31.4 million broadband households. Charter had 10.9 million cellular customers compared to 29.9 million broadband households. AT&T reported for 2Q 2025 that 40% of its fiber customers are buying cellular. I can’t find where Verizon highlights the percentage of homes that buy cellular and broadband.

So this year, the stock market doesn’t seem to be valuing the converged carriers evenly. As I wrote this blog, T-Mobile stock was up 19% for the year. Comcast stock is down 11% for the year and Charter is down 22%. Verizon stock is up 6% and AT&T is up 20%. There is a story behind all of the stock price changes, and it mostly involves changes in customers and earnings, not in the percentage of convergence.

One thing is clear. These five companies dominate the telecommunications space. The five companies have most of the cellular customers in the country, and T-Mobile will be adding customers from the USCellular purchase. The five companies had over 98 million broadband customers at the end of the second quarter of 2025, and Charter will be adding 6-7 million more customers if the merger with Cox is approved. The five companies account for almost all of the national net growth of broadband customers.

The KeyBank analyst was looking at the long-term trajectory of T-Mobile compared to the other giant companies. The analysis statement seems to assume that FWA growth will eventually top out and decline in competition with the other big carriers. But for now, in the second quarter, T-Mobile had the biggest growth in both cellular and broadband customers. It’s obvious that T-Mobile has something today that customers value. My crystal ball is not clear enough to be able to predict that T-Mobile is going to stop growing any time soon, and it seems too early to predict that T-Mobile won’t be in the same category as the other four converged companies.

Cellular Upload Speeds

T-Mobile recently announced a cellular speed test where the company was able to achieve an upload speed of 550 Mbps on a live cellular link. The test was clearly done in ideal conditions in order to achieve the fast speed, but T-Mobile acknowledges that upload speeds are increasingly important to customers. Fierce Network quoted T-Mobile President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson as saying, “uplink is the next big thing.”

This is something the broadband industry has known for many years. Fiber companies set a standard of symmetrical download and upload speeds, which frankly provide more upload speed than people need. But the public complained loudly about the slow upload speeds from cable companies during the pandemic, and cable companies have scrambled to increase upload speeds using mid-split upgrades. Cable companies have upgraded many markets to upload speeds of 100 to 200 Mbps.

This new speed test record seems to have been released to complement T-Mobile’s press release in April, where it announced that it now offers the first nationwide 5G Advanced network. By that, T-Mobile means its 5G network has begun to incorporate the latest industry 5G standards included in 3 GPP Release 17 and 18. According to the press release, T-Mobile has implemented 5G Advanced nationwide, although there is some discussion in the Fierce Network article saying that is not likely.

There is no doubt that T-Mobile has upgraded networks to a greater degree than the competition, as documented in the latest report from Ookla for the end of 2024 where T-Mobile had a median download speed of 281.5 Mbps, compared to 199.1 Mbps for Verizon and 140.1 for AT&T.  However, during that same period, T-Mobile’s median upload speed, as measured by Ookla, was much slower at 21.3 Mbps. In the April press release, T-Mobile said its typical upload speeds are between 6 and 31 Mbps.

Upload speeds likely matter a lot more to T-Mobile now that it has passed the 6 million customer mark with its FWA home broadband product. Folks who use broadband for gaming, working from home, online schooling, and conferencing are not going to be enamored with a broadband product where poor upload speeds can degrade performance. The current median speed of 21 Mbps is basically the same as the speed customers don’t like on cable company networks.

Upload speeds are probably the biggest long-term weakness of FWA broadband. FWA customers who live in rural areas might not have another alternative other than Starlink, which also has slow upload speeds. But a lot of FWA’s growth is coming from suburbs and cities where customers have a broadband alternative. Cable companies are scrambling to get much faster upload speeds, and fiber generally has symmetrical speeds. Ookla points out in its latest quarterly report that upload usage is growing at a much faster pace than download usage. T-Mobile is being smart in looking at a way to improve upload speeds.

What’s Going on With Boost Mobile?

Boost Mobile added 90,000 net new cellular customers in the first quarter of 2025, increasing customers to 7.1 million. That’s a big turnaround from recent quarters with customer losses. Reaching net additions might mean the company is finally turning the corner to become successful.

Boost Mobile was acquired by Dish Networks as a result of the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. One of the FCC requirements was that Sprint would be replaced in the market with a new nationwide carrier, and the FCC took steps to enable Dish to be the new nationwide carrier.

When Dish acquired Boost Mobile for $1.4 billion in 2021, the company had over 9 million customers, but customers slowly leaked away since then. During those years, Dish has been deploying a new 5G SA (standalone) network and now claims to be able to cover 80% of the people in the country from it’s own cell sites. Boost is deploying with open RAN technology, meaning the company isn’t locked into the specific hardware and software from the big cellular vendors.

Boost met its first buildout requirements and was able to reach 70% of the U.S. population by June 2023. However, Boost asked for and received a delay for deploying four spectrum blocks (AWS-4, lower 700 MHz E, 600 MHz, and AWS H) until December 14, 2026 instead of June 14, 2025.

Boost Mobile still has a way to go to activate traffic on its newly built network. Most of its customers are still roaming on AT&T and T-Mobile. In the 4Q 2024 earnings call for parent Echostar, executives from Boost Mobile admitted that only 1 million customers were riding the Boost network.

A recent article from Ookla documents that the Boost Mobile networks are getting faster but are still not up on average to the speeds of T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T. However, speeds are improving, and Boost says it will have the fastest network in some major markets this year. Near the end of last year, Boost was named as the fastest cellular provider in New York City. I have to wonder how much of that speed is due to having a largely empty network?

Boost Mobile has a long way to go to be relevant. At the end of the first quarter of this year, Verizon claimed 146 million customers, T-Mobile 131 million, and AT&T 118 million. Boost is also behind the two big cable companies, with Charter having 10.4 million cellular customers and Comcast 8.2 million.

It’s interesting how customers have not moved to Boost Mobile. The company is offering competitive prices. One would have to think that its networks are relatively empty and nearly pristine. Dish made a public relations blunder when it opened cell sites a few years ago before the open RAN technology was working well. If Boost is now on solid technical footing, there is opportunity for growth. There has been a lot of press and speculation over the last year that T-Mobile and Verizon might be overstressing their networks due to the proliferation of FWA home cellular broadband.

To add to the drama. Echostar, the parent of Boost announced last week that it is electing to miss a $326 million interest payment on its 2029 maturity debt. If the company doesn’t make the payment by the end of June it will be forced into chapter 11 bankruptcy. Echostar may be playing chicken with the FCC and is blaming the default on the FCC not resolving some of the open spectrum issues for the company

One thing is for sure. Assuming it survives, Boost Mobile has a long way to go to be a serious nationwide carrier. The company may never reach the size of Sprint which it is supposedly replacing. It will be interesting to watch if the company can reach solvency and justify the big investment made in the new nationwide network.

Increasing Broadband Price Competition

Competition has been creeping into broadband pricing for the last several years as cable companies have been using low introductory rates to try to win new customers and offering similarly low price to try to keep them. Anybody who competes against the big cable companies will tell you that cable companies have been competing for years by offering two-year promotional prices to keep customers.

However, competition might have gone into a new gear recently when Comcast began offering low rates with a five-year price guarantee. The 5-year guaranteed rates were introduced soon after Verizon offered a 3-year price guarantee for FWA wireless home broadband.

In a Comcast blog dated April 15, Comcast announced a 5-year guaranteed rate plan for new customers for 400 Mbps broadband for $55 per month. The product comes with the company’s WiFi Gateway and no contract is required. The plan also includes a free Comcast cell phone plan with a 30 GB data cap for one year. This is a substantial discount. The list price for 400 Mbps is $86, and the normal charge for the WiFi Gateway is $15. The cell phone normally costs $30 per month. The 5-year rate is available through June 23, but Comcast has already told some news outlets that the special rate offer will probably be extended.

On the announcement date, several news outlets like PC Magazine listed the 5-year deal packages as 400 Mbps ($55), 600 Mbps ($70), 1.1 Gbps ($85), and 2.1 Gbps ($105). The outlets also reported that these rates only come with an auto debit to a bank account. Comcast will charge $8 more to bill to a credit card and $10 more for a paper bill.

The low prices were likely also prompted by the recent announcement that Comcast lost 199,000 broadband customers in the first quarter. In this same quarter, the FWA products from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon gained 913,000 customers.

Comcast’s competition isn’t sitting still. Verizon recently announced a 3-year lock for FWA broadband prices at $35 per month for customers who accept autopay and who also buy a Verizon cell plan. Verizon includes up to a $250 Amazon gift card. Not to be outdone, T-Mobile now offers a $35 price for FWA broadband with a 5-year guarantee for customers who have a T-Mobile cellular plan. The Verizon and T-Mobile plans seem to be more focused on reducing cellular churn than gaining new broadband customers.

Comcast is clearly trying to stop the loss of customers. I have to wonder about the overall impact of such widely advertised special rates. How will these low play with the millions of customers who are paying a lot more, including the many paying $15 per month for a WiFi gateway?

Will this lead to Comcast finally lowering its list prices? The company has raised rates annually for over a decade. Can the company maintain high rates in noncompetitive markets while widely advertising severely discounted prices elsewhere?

I’ve been saying for years that broadband will cost $100 per month. When considering the WiFi gateway, Comcast’s list prices were already there. Comcast isn’t even the most expensive cable company, and a handful of cable companies like Cox, Breezeline, and Mediacom have even higher list prices.

This announcement by Comcast, and the constant advertisements from the FWA providers, could prove to be a watershed moment for prices in the industry. Just imagine the glee that USTelecom will have next year if they can announce that prices for broadband are actually decreasing.

The Big Carrier Chess Board

There was big news in the long-haul fiber business recently when Zayo announced it will be acquiring the fiber assets of Crown Castle and adding 90,000 miles of fiber to its network. The acquisition will also Zayo’s access to major buildings to 70,000. Zayo says the acquisition will position it as a major player in providing transport for AI. Zayo has been actively building new fiber routes across the country in the last few years.

Crown Castle is also selling its small cell business to EQT, a major investor in Zayo. The announced cost of the fiber acquisition is reported at $4.25 billion. My back-of-the-envelope math says that is paying $47,000 dollars per route mile for long-haul fiber. That seems like a huge bargain. Here is the map of the Crown Castle network. The map doesn’t show the many local routes within metropolitan areas.

There have been rumors that Crown Castle hasn’t been doing well, with its slowdown based on the decision of cellular carriers to expand via small cell sites. Crown Castle made a major bet that small cell sites was going to be a thriving business. That didn’t sound like a bad bet based on the rhetoric of the big cellular carriers a few years ago – but the expansion to small cell sites ceased abruptly.

This will cause a big shift in the large carrier market. Vertical Systems Group tracks the large carrier market. For 2024 they rank the leasers in that market as 1-Luman, 2-Zayo, 3-Verizon, 4-AT&T, and 5-Crown Castle. Each of these business has at least a 4% market share in selling fiber  wavelengths. We’ll have to see if the acquisition bumps Zayo to number one.

Zayo was ranked seventh in connections to lit buildings, with Crown Castle listed at eighth. One has to thin this might move Zayo ahead of number six Cox, or number five Lumen.

Lumen is also in the news. It’s widely reported in the press that AT&T is going to make a $5.5 billion bid for Lumen’s retail fiber business. This deal is far from over, and AT&T hasn’t even made a formal offer yet. There are already rumors that T-Mobile, Verizon, and BCE (the Canadian company that recently purchased Ziply Fiber) might make counteroffers.

Interestingly, analysts are saying that an AT&T bid for Lumen’s fiber customers is as much about reducing cell phone churn as it is in acquiring fiber customers. However, if AT&T is successful in buying Lumen, they would grow to 55 million fiber passings, compared to 35 million for Verizon and 12 million for T-Mobile.

Verizon will be growing it’s footprint and is expected to close the acquisition of Frontier sometime this year. T-Mobile has also been active in fiber acquisitions and purchased a share of Lumos and Metronet last year and is partnering with two ISPs in Louisiana that are pursuing BEAD grants.

There are lots of other rumors in the industry, with the biggest being that T-Mobile is interested in buying Charter, which has over 30 million broadband customers.

It’s clearly going to be an interesting year watching the big companies move pieced around the chess board.

Rural 5G

The FCC voted last year to launch the 5G Fund for Rural America to expand 5G coverage into the many parts of country with poor cell coverage. It may turn out that market forces might mean that some of that subsidy won’t be needed since the big carriers are expanding into rural areas. A recent blog from Ookla documents the rural expansion of 5G. Ookla concludes that fierce nationwide competitive pressure is driving the carriers to look harder at rural areas to gain every possible customer.

Ookla, which collects a huge volume of speed tests, is one of the few companies that can look at carrier expansion using its own data. When Ookla sees multiple speed tests on 5G, it has definitive proof that coverage is present in an area. Ookla looked at the recent rural expansion from each of the three primary carriers.

T-Mobile. Ookla shows that T-Mobile has the largest rural 5G footprint today. T-Mobile claims it covers 323 million people, or 98% of U.S. households with 5G using its low-band 600 MHz spectrum. This low-band spectrum carriers for a greater distance than the spectrum used by other carriers. The company was required to expand coverage to 97% of the population as part of the agreement with the FCC when it purchased Sprint. I have to wonder about the 98% coverage. If you look closely at the FCC cellular maps, T-Mobile shows coverage of very slow speeds over a lot of rural America, and you have to wonder if this coverage is real enough to even use for voice calls.

T-Mobile also is the fastest carrier in much of the country, which came from the deployment of the 2.5 GHz spectrum that the company acquired with the Sprint purchase. The company has used the 150 MHz band of the spectrum to increase speeds in the top 100 markets in the country. We know that T-Mobile has rural plans since the company announced in 2024 that it is hoping to achieve a 20% market share in rural America by the end of 2025. That claim is bolstered by the pending close of the purchase of 30% of the spectrum and all 4.5 million customers of UScellular.

AT&T. A lot of the company’s rural expansion comes from FirstNet. This is a nationally funded program to create a nationwide first responder network. AT&T was awarded $6.5 billion to build the network and also given 20 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum. FirstNet brought AT&T a 25-year contract with the government. There is an expected $2 billion additional investment to upgrade the network to 5G everywhere.

One of the key requirements for FirstNet is that it must be made available to first responders in rural areas. This led AT&T to install FirstNet on all of its own towers and to build over 1,000 rural towers. AT&T announced in October 2024 that it has 6.4 million connections and 29,000 public safety agencies on the network. AT&T has also invested heavily in spectrum auctions and spent $37 billion the FCC’s C-band and 3.45 GHz auctions.

Verizon. Verizon doesn’t own much low-band spectrum that would give it coverage in rural areas. Instead, the company relied on a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) that allows one spectrum band to toggle between 4G LTE and 5G  in 1 millisecond increments. While it works, this didn’t give the company the boost it was hoping for.

Verizon’s rural strategy seems to be through acquisition, and the company has bought cell carriers operating in Kentucky, Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Montana. Verizon is also buying $1 billion of 850 MHz, AWS and PCS spectrum from UScellular.

Verizon is betting on the C-Band spectrum that it purchased in 2021 for $52 billion. It’s hoping that the 161 MHz band of spectrum will carry it into the future. The company has announced it intends to deploy more rural spectrum,

None of the carriers are likely to expand into sparely populated rural areas where coverage is often nonexistent. But the current expansion plans likely will bring cellular relief to a lot of rural areas, long before any solution might come from the FCC.

Pushing the Speed Limit

Today’s blog is about several new fast broadband deployments. It seems that every year that vendors are developing new technologies that will speed up our networks and broadband connections.

The first was an announcement from AT&T that the company completed a live test of a 1.6 terabit fiber connection on a route between Newark and Philadelphia. The connection was tested over AT&T’s long-haul network that was also running 100 Gbps and 400 Gbps links.

The fast link was created by combining two 800 Gbps links created by white hardware operating with the Broadcom Jericho3 packet processor chip. The two links were combined using Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme cohere optical transponder. At the two ends of the link, the signal was processed by 800 G DR8 pluggable transceivers from Coherent which created the cross-connectivity to communicate with other packet and optical technologies.

This new link is four times faster than the 400 Gbps lasers that are being installed nationwide as the newest iteration of ling-haul and middle-mile networks – replacing the 100 Gbps lasers that were the standard for the last decade.

Lumen announced that the company successfully created a 1.2 terabyte connection connection on an 1,800 mile long link. The link was accomplished on what Lumen calls its ultra-low-loss (ULL) network. The test used Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme technology and Ciena’s Waveserver platform along with Juniper 800 Gbps routers.

The AT&T news release of the test quoted Mike Satterlee, VP of Network Infrastructure and Services as saying that these tests are vital for AT&T to keep up with future demand. He was quoted as saying that AT&T expected that overall long-haul network traffic will be doubling by 2028.

The other groundbreaking speed trial was conducted by T-Mobile. The company was able to achieve a 6.3 Gbps connection on a Samsung Galaxy S25 cell phone. The phone was using the Snapdragon X80 5G modem-RF system. The 6.3 Gbps test was achieved in the lab, and the speed achieved on a real-world 5G network was 4.3 Gbps. A second test achieved the same speeds using a non-commercial handset that used Qualcomm’s X85 5G Modem.

The network test was conducted using Nokia’s 5G radio access RAN. The sped was achieved by aggregating 2.5 GHz, AWS, and 600 MHz spectrum. The test was not as much about speed as it was the ability to combine multiple frequencies to create a high-bandwidth path.

These trials are proof that carriers are constantly pushing vendors to develop the next-generation of network gear that brings greater capacity. Middle-mile and long haul routes are under strain from unexpected traffic from AI data centers. But long-haul network operators are reporting a big uptick in requests for 100 gigabit data connections across markets and unrelated to AI.

Deprioritized Broadband

There is an interesting trend of ISPs selling broadband products that are not always guaranteed to be at the same speed and quality as other customers.

Throttling customer speeds is not new to the industry. Some of the companies that with long-time data caps throttle data to slow speeds after a customer reaches the monthly allowance of usage. Most such ISPs offer an alternative for customers to buy extra broadband to maintain their normal speeds. Some of the companies that have had this practice include the high-orbit satellite providers, cell carriers providing hotspot plans, and a handful of others. Many companies with data plans don’t throttle speeds and just automatically bill more for going over the data cap.

I’ve noted this practice again in recent years from the big FWA cellular providers that sell home broadband using cellular spectrum. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have all reserved the right to throttle customers any time that the network gets too busy. For example, from the terms from T-Mobile, “During network congestion, some T-Mobile internet customers might notice slower speeds, including Home Internet customers” Home Internet is the FWA home broadband product.

I’ve been able to observe examples of them doing this. I’ve seen speed tests from customers using FWA that have speeds over 200 Mbps during the year who occasionally get throttled down to just a few Mbps. I think these customers are surprised every time this happens and probably don’t understand or remember that the throttling is a part of the terms they agreed to.

It’s easy to understand why cellular companies would throttle home broadband customer first – they are protecting their cellular customers. I’m sure all of the FWA providers are happy with the new revenues coming from FWA, but T-Mobile is not going to let the home broadband for 6.4 million FWA customers threaten the experience of 130 cellular customers.

Starlink also throttles certain customers. One of the features of Starlink’s Away plan for campers and hikers is that Starlink reserves the right to throttle data usage if the network gets too busy. It’s also easy to understand this. As the RV products becomes more successful, it’s not hard to imagine a lot of campers coming together at the same location wanting to connect to Starlink. That traffic alone could overload a particular satellite, but Starlink is also shielding its customers who live in the same region and who are paying full price.

Starlink also reserves the right to throttle customers who buy its new ‘Residential Lite’ product for $80 per month. Rather than mention throttling, Starlink calls it deprioritization, “This service plan will be deprioritized compared to Residential service during peak hours. This means speeds may be slower for Residential Lite service relative to Residential service when our network has the most users online”. This term is at the top of the company’s advertising for the product, and they want customers who want the lower rate to recognize what comes with the plan. The company is making it clear that there are trade-offs for getting the lower price.

I’ve been thinking about all of these plans and net neutrality. One of the key features of the national net neutrality plan was that ISPs couldn’t engage in paid prioritization, meaning that a customer could not be charged more to be guaranteed a better connection.

It’s not clear to me that this practice violates that principle. In the case of the FWA products, every customer buying the FWA product runs the risk of having data throttled – there is no other class of customers with higher priority unless it’s cellphone customers. Starlink is a little different in that customers can save money by agreeing to possibly be throttled. Is having customers agree save money by being deprioritized the same as charging somebody else more to get a better priority?

It certainly doesn’t matter at the federal level since the Courts recently killed the appeal to the FCC’s net neutrality case – and the FCC would have killed net neutrality anyway if the Courts didn’t do it. It is a more germane question in California which adopted a state net neutrality plan that largely mimics the federal rules.

Devaluing Spectrum

Mike Dano recently wrote an article for LightReading that talks about the plummeting value of 5G millimeter wave spectrum. The FCC started the process of auctioning this spectrum in 2018, and Verizon, T-Mobile, Echostar, AT&T, and smaller carriers paid almost $10 billion for the 24 GHz millimeter wave spectrum. The unique aspect of the auction was the huge size of the channels and the first auction offered two blocks of 425 MHz, while the second auction offered seven blocks of 100 MHz.

At the time, this was touted as the spectrum that was going to supercharge 5G. Verizon launched a public trial using the spectrum in 2019 in downtown Chicago and Minneapolis. Customers with special phones enabled for the new spectrum were able to get speeds of 500 Mbps. Soon after, there were more trials in more cities by multiple carriers. You may remember the TV commercials at the time showing gigabit speed tests on cellphones.

Unfortunately, the trials showed the real-world limitations of the millimeter wave spectrum. The signal didn’t carry far, and small cell sites were needed every few thousand feet to provide coverage. While the spectrum could bounce off buildings to extend coverage, any object in the direct path of a cell tower blocked the signal, even the human body and glass windows. It also became quickly clear that, other than the novelty of being superfast, cell customers had no real need for gigabit speeds which greatly exceeded the computing capacity of cellphones. The real issue that made this unfeasible was the cost of a network. In this same time frame, carriers were all collectively touting they would deploy a half million small cell sites, but that effort died quickly when it became clear that there wasn’t any new revenue stream to pay for the new networks.

Interestingly, the rest of the world never put much faith in millimeter wave spectrum. Currently, many phones in the U.S. can still receive this spectrum band, but it’s not included in phones sold in the rest of the world.

Carriers have started the process of walking away or devaluing the millimeter wave spectrum. In July, T-Mobile walked away from 520 licenses for the spectrum, something that is almost unheard of in the carrier world. UScellular recently cut the value of the spectrum by half in its books.

This is not to say that there is no value in the millimeter wave spectrum. Verizon thinks this is the right spectrum to use in places like stadiums and other crowded outdoor venues. This is also a powerful spectrum to use indoors to carry gigabit speeds. The need of the millimeter wave spectrum became obsolete for cellular when the FCC auctioned C-Band spectrum in 2021, which behaves much better outdoors.

This is not the first spectrum sold at auction to be a bust. For example, the FCC auctioned Multipoint/Multichannel Distribution Service (MMDS) spectrum in 1995 and 1996. This was spectrum between 2.3 – 2.5 GHz that was touted as wireless cable TV. In the U.S. this was auctioned in 31 separate 6 MHz channels, each intended to carry one channel of cable TV. A handful of small cable companies made this work, but the idea quickly lost interest when channel lineups grew to hundreds of channels. The most memorable thing about this spectrum was a number of scams where license holders resold the spectrum to unsophisticated buyers.

The FCC also auctioned Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) spectrum in 1998. This was spectrum in the 27.5 – 31.3 GHz range that was touted as the future of point-to-multipoint wireless. The first gear was promoted as theoretically being able to deliver up to 100 Mbps for 1.5 miles, a remarkable speed at the time. However, the spectrum quickly fell out of favor when only a few vendors tried to market the radios – and all of the radios had been rushed to market and had big problems when deployed to customers.