Tag Archives: T-Mobile

The Spectrum Auction Winners

After a four-year hiatus, the FCC recently held a spectrum auction of 200 licenses for AWS-3 spectrum in the 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1780 MHz, and 2155-2180 MHz bands. The last FCC auction was in 2022 for 2.5 GHz spectrum. The FCC lost the ability to hold spectrum auctions when its Congressional authority lapsed and was not renewed. This spectrum was touted by the FCC as being 5G-grade. The license areas included in the auction covered over 100 million people across 48 states and two US territories, and included major markets like New York, Chicago, Boston, Tampa, and Charlotte. The FCC announced before the auction that much of the proceeds will be used to continue to fund the rip-and-replace of Chinese electronics from Huawei and ZTE.

The winning bidders collectively bid more than $3.57 billion. The winners are as follows, from largest to smallest:

  • Verizon Wireless: $3,162,445,000 for 82 licenses in 82 markets
  • T-Mobile: $277,787,000 for 102 licenses in 102 markets
  • AT&T: $120,774,000 for 10 licenses in 10 markets
  • SpaceX: $8,490,200 for two licenses in two markets
  • Blue Ridge Wireless II LLC: $2,090,000 for one license in one market
  • Conundrum Wireless, LLC: $1,228,000 for two licenses in one market
  • Citizens Band License Company, LLC: $75,000 for one license in one market

Not surprisingly, 99.7% of the spectrum was claimed by the three big cellular carriers, with Verizon snagging 88.5% of the awards. Folks might be surprised to see SpaceX as the fourth-largest winner. The company is looking for spectrum to enhance its direct-to-cell mobile services. Analysts speculated that this auction was a trial run for the company to learn about the auction process since the company has already agreed to buy $2.6 billion in spectrum in the AWS-3, AWS-4, and H-blocks from EchoStar.

Verizon was using the auction to fill holes in its spectrum portfolio and spent almost $2 billion of its winning bids in New York, Chicago, and Boston. AT&T’s biggest focus was for Charlotte. T-Mobile dropped out of all of the expensive markets, but still won the most licenses spread across small metropolitan areas.

ike many actions by the federal government these days, there is also an interesting backstory to this auction. The spectrum that was included in this auction originally came from EchoStar (originally Dish Networks). Two companies, SNR Wireless and Northstar Wireless, originally purchased the spectrum in the 2014 AWS-3 auction for $3.3 billion. When the FCC learned that Dish was the secret backer of the two companies, the FCC voided the awards. The FCC ruled that when this spectrum was eventually reauctioned, that Dish would owe the FCC any shortfall if the new auction raises anything less than $2.9 billion.

Roger Entner of Recon Analytics says that EchoStar bid up the current auction to save itself from having to pay for any shortfall in the auction. EchoStar entered the recent auction with almost as many bid credits as Verizon. Entner claims that EchoStar was in the auction for no other purpose than bidding up the price, and in doing so, increased the proceeds of the auction from $2 billion to the final $3.57 billion. He says that EchoStar stayed in the auction until the auction reached the threshold where the company was off the hook for paying for the shortfall. In the next two rounds, the company dropped out of every market except for two licenses it got stuck with in Guam. The company is no longer in the cellular business, and Entner expects it will sell this spectrum at a discount to a local cellular provider or just ride out the build-out shot clock until the FCC is forced to reclaim the spectrum.

It’s going to be interesting to see if the three big carriers take any action against EchoStar for driving up the prices. I don’t have the slightest idea if EchoStar did anything illegal, but its bidding actions were certainly shady.

Behind the Scenes at T-Mobile

There is some interesting corporate maneuvering happening behind the scenes at T-Mobile. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) talks about the plans that Timotheus Höttges, the CEO of Deutsche Telekom, has for his company. The company is already the biggest cellular company in the world with over 273 million mobile customers in fifty countries.

Höttges is now trying to orchestrate a full merger between the two firms. Deutsche Telekom currently owns 54% of T-Mobile, and during his twelve years in charge of the company, he’s changed T-Mobile from a company that perpetually lost money to one of the most recognizable brand names in the industry. He thinks a merger is needed to give T-Mobile the resources it needs to fully succeed.

T-Mobile recognizes that the key to success is to own a large number of both fiber and cellular customers. The company has been engaging in partnership deals to gain a share of fiber overbuilders. A few years ago, the company purchased a 50% stake in Metronet, a Midwest fiber overbuilder. The company engaged in a joint venture with EQT to acquire Lumos. More recently, T-Mobile purchased 50% of i3 Broadband, GoNetspeed, and Greenlight Networks. The company bought all of the ownership of US Internet in the Twin Cities.

The Wall Street Journal reports that T-Mobile is financially constrained from growing through big acquisitions and deals. The current T-Mobile corporate structure makes it impossible for the company to buy companies by issuing stocks without diluting the ownership of Deutsche Telekom, and it’s limited on how much debt it can take on.

Höttges believes that combining Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile into a giant $300 billion company will allow T-Mobile to take on the debt needed to grow. He thinks T-Mobile should be competing with AT&T and Verizon, and that’s going to take big acquisitions.

Höttges apparently has his work cut out for him. Current T-Mobile shareholders might not be interested in gaining ownership of the lower-margin Deutsche Telekom. He also needs to convince the German government, which owns a 28% share of Deutsche Telekom. And if he can pull off those steps, he has a lot of work to do to gain regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe.

You have to wonder where an unconstrained T-Mobile would look for growth. There are still additional mid-sized and smaller fiber overbuilders it could pursue. The largest cable company that could be on the market is Altice, which is mired in a lawsuit against Apollo Global Management, Ares Management, and BlackRock that accuses the companies of trying to force it into bankruptcy.

The only other large companies that might make sense for a merger with T-Mobile would be Charter or Comcast. I’ve been reading several analysts lately who think the big blockbuster mergers are inevitable. But some think a more natural suitor for these companies would be SpaceX.

There is a lot that has to happen for Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile before any big blockbuster deal can be contemplated.  For those of us who enjoy watching the big boys maneuver, the next few years are going to be very interesting.

Promises Made, Promises Broken

I noticed that the Charter/Cox merger has been approved by the FCC, the DOJ, and the Public Service Commission of New York. The final hurdle is the California Public Service Commission, where Charter is hoping to get a decision by August from the CPUC. In exchange for an agreement for the merger, Charter has promised to spend at least $275 million on network upgrades to achieve symmetrical gigabit speeds across its California footprint within three years. Charter also promises to offer a statewide low-income price plan for five years that includes a $20 plan for 100/20 Mbps speeds, and that would be free for Lifeline Pilot participants. Finally, Charter promises to provide $23 million in support to the nonprofit CETF (California Emerging Technology Fund) for digital literacy and device subsidies, plus $7 million to regional broadband groups.

I had a chuckle when I saw the promises being made by Charter. It reminded me of many times that carriers didn’t follow through on big promises made to regulators. One of the most memorable broken promises came from Verizon in Pennsylvania – a story that has been well documented in a book by Bruce Kushnick, The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net. In 1993, the State agreed to deregulate Verizon and provide big tax breaks as long as Verizon would deliver 45 Mbps broadband service to the entire state by 2015. By the early 2000s, Verizon reneged on the offer and reduced the promised speeds to 1.5 Mbps. Verizon eventually built FiOS fiber in selected urban and suburban markets and ignored the rest of the state. There were some rural Verizon customers who never even got the slow DSL.

In 1999, the two Baby Bell companies SBC and Ameritech, asked to merge. SBC promised regulators that the merger would spark a new, nationally competitive telecommunications carrier and committed to expand beyond its thirteen-state home region. Within a year of the deal closing, the FCC opened an investigation against SBC for failing to meet its competitive entry timelines and because of growing volumes of consumer complaints about declining residential service quality.

When AT&T asked in 2015 to acquire DirecTV for $48.5 billion, the company promised federal regulators to build out more than 12 million high-speed fiber connections. The company quickly fell short of that promise, and many believed that the company was faking fiber passings by counting apartment complexes that were near to its existing fiber network. AT&T eventually decided that building fiber was its best business plan, but it had totally blown off the 2015 promise.

When Charter asked to merge with Time Warner Cable in 2016, the company promised regulators that it would expand its network to unserved rural areas, that it would hold down prices, and would not implement price caps. By 2020, Charter petitioned the FCC to get off the hook for these promises and called them “unduly burdensome”

In 2020, when T-Mobile wanted to buy Sprint for $26 billion, the company promised it would rapidly expand rural 5G coverage. The company also promised to freeze post-paid rate plans for three years. Soon after the merger, the company said the agreement was no longer feasible.

I could fill a few pages with similar stories. Big carriers make whatever promises are needed to get approval for mergers or deregulation, and then typically proceed almost immediately to find ways to get out of what they promised. It’s hard to predict if California will approve the Charter/Cox merger. But I think California fully understands that promises made related to mergers are rarely promises fully kept.

Market Consolidation Continues

It looks like industry mergers and acquisition activity is in high gear lately. It’s hard to remember a week when there wasn’t a press release about upcoming M&A activity in the telecom sector, and I have been writing a similar blog every six months. Following is some of the most recent activity.

In the ISP Space. T-Mobile announced it entered two joint ventures to acquire 50% of three U.S. fiber businesses – GoNetspeed, Greenlight Networks, and i3 Broadband. T-Mobile seems to be gobbling up last-mile fiber properties all over the country.

TDS Telecom announced plans to buy Granite State Communications, a telco in New Hampshire with more than 11,000 service addresses.

Truvista Fiber is buying the municipal fiber network from the City of Commerce, Georgia, with plans to expand to reach residential customers.

Middle-Mile / Networks. Zayo just closed on the $4.25 billion acquisition of the fiber assets of Crown Castle Fiber. This adds 90,000 miles of fiber to Zayo’s U.S. network.

The managed service providers Spectrotel and Airespring announced a merger to become more competitive in serving business customers.

GCI in Alaska is acquiring Q Gateway Intermediate Holdings (Quintillion), a fiber infrastructure provider in the state. The purchase brings 1,800 miles of subsea and terrestrial fiber, along with active construction on additional routes.

Lumen is buying the cloud network company Alkira for $475 million. This brings expertise in AI programmable networking. Lumen has obviously decided to beef up its enterprise business now that it recently closed on the sale of last-mile fiber customers to AT&T.

Vendors. Inseego, a wireless edge vendor, is buying the FWA business line from Nokia.

Render Networks is acquiring mPower, a company that makes management tools for electric and water utilities.

Satellite. Amazon announced plans to purchase Globalstar for $11 billion. This jump-starts Amazon’s entry into the direct-to-device market.

The Mother of all Merger Rumors. In what would be the biggest telecom merger ever, Fierce Networks had a story about analysts at New Street Research who are speculating that a merger between Comcast and Charter makes a lot of sense. They said that Charter is still open to further acquisitions after it closes on the merger with Cox Communications. The article even speculated on Charter being an acquisition target for T-Mobile or SpaceX.

We can’t forget the three big ISP mergers of Charter/Cox, AT&T/Lumen Fiber, and Verizon/Frontier. The biggest ISPs are suddenly getting a lot larger.

How Good is Rural Cellular Coverage – Part II

Yesterday’s blog looked at AT&T cellular coverage in a typical rural county in Illinois and included the following map. The map shows where AT&T can provide 5G coverage in a moving vehicle in the dark areas, and where somebody standing stationary outdoors could get a 5G signal in the lighter colored areas.

Let’s look at the maps for the other two major carriers in the same areas. The first map below is T-Mobile, and the second is Verizon.

These maps show typical coverage. The two carriers support 5G in moving vehicles in and close to towns and cities. The light colored areas are where somebody standing outdoors can likely get a 5G signal. An indoor cellular coverage map would likely not be a lot larger than the dark areas.

Taken altogether, these maps show a typical rural story of cellular coverage. Cell carriers rarely share towers, and each carrier is on different towers and has different coverage. All three carriers have areas where they have no 5G coverage, and somebody subscribed to any one carrier in this county would find a lot of dead zones. All three carriers have little or no coverage in the northwest sector. These maps show something that every rural delivery driver knows – to work in rural America means carrying multiple cellphones subscribed to different carriers.

When Chairman Carr says that 96.8% of households have 5G coverage, we have to put that into perspective. Over 80% of Americans live in cities and suburbs and likely have good cell coverage. Another substantial percentage live in smaller towns that happen to have at least one cell tower. In this particular county, 60% of people live in incorporated towns and villages, meaning there are a lot of rural residents.

What’s the point of these two blogs? The FCC considers this County to have good 5G coverage. That assumption comes largely from looking at the combined coverage of the three carriers shown for somebody standing stationary outdoors. The light colored areas of the three maps combined cover most of the county.

If the FCC ever decides to finally launch the 5G Fund for Rural America, this county will likely not be a candidate for a grant to build new cell towers. That’s unfortunate, because I estimate that 30% of the residents of this county would say they have poor cellular coverage. They will say that they don’t have good coverage indoors, and no matter which carrier they subscribe to, they hit dead spots when they drive around the county. The FCC’s assertion that 96.8% of homes have good 5G coverage can be supported by the FCC maps – but those maps don’t show the reality of the way that people judge cellular coverage.

Leftover Copper Customers

I read that T-Mobile was thinking about buying the fiber assets of UNITI, which includes the fiber assets of Windstream. Regardless of whether that sale happens or not, it made me wonder about what happens to the customers served by copper who don’t go with a sale. Copper customers would be those served with telephone copper who are buying traditional TDM telephone service, DSL, and T1s and related products.

The concept of buying only fiber customers from an ISP seems to be a new industry theme. Lumen sold its fiber customers to AT&T but retained the copper customers. We know Lumen’s stated plans when it sold fiber customers to AT&T. The company publicly said it would retain and care for its copper-based consumer services since they continue to provide a strong ongoing financial contribution to the company.

But will they really? I have to think that a lot of Lumen markets were a mixture of copper and fiber, and that a lot of the technicians and much of the support apparatus for caring for these customers will leave with the fiber customers. I could be wrong, but I find it hard to imagine that Lumen will provide a robust maintenance crew to take care of the copper customers. This seems even less likely for a smaller company like Windstream. Will the remaining company really want to keep the entire company structure needed to take care of copper customers? That’s not only technicians in trucks, but it means somebody to man the central offices, somebody to field customer service calls, somebody to take technical service calls and dispatch repairmen.

I have a hard time picturing a telco willing to retain all of these functions to care for a fraction of their previous customers and for a shrinking customer base. This would also mean having to keep technicians who understand copper. I already know that all big telcos have lost most of their experienced copper technicians to retirement. I have a hard time envisioning technicians willing to go to work for a telco that only owns copper – there would be no upward mobility to learn newer technologies, and the job is guaranteed to end when the copper is eventually decommissioned. Does anybody really want to be a Lumen copper technician?

It seems buyers of fiber customers don’t want the hassle of buying the copper networks and then having to go through the process of disposing of the copper and disconnecting customers. It’s fully understandable that a company like T-Mobile wouldn’t want to take on that burden with UNITI. The FCC recently changed the rules to make it easier to dispose of copper customers, and as part of that order, the FCC overrode any state regulations related to disposing of copper customers. But the FCC did not eliminate all regulatory rules related to owning a regulated telephone company, and I’m sure that one of the  motivations for a company like T-Mobile not to take copper customers is to avoid getting dragged into that regulatory world.

Windstream and Lumen got some recent help from the FCC when it said that companies with copper networks can ‘grandfather’ their TDM products, meaning they don’t have to sell services to any new customers. While the FCC order didn’t use the term, this means the end of the carrier of last resort responsibilities for telcos.

I would not be surprised to see Lumen or other companies stuck with a copper-only network take the path of milking any remaining revenues from those customers, but doing nothing to retain or maintain the customers. For example, if a copper customer has a technical issue, they might be dropped instead of trying to fix the problem. This kind of approach would keep revenues for a while while eliminating most of the cost of keeping and operating a copper network.

A Rural Cellular Story

I was looking through the FCC cellular map in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where I live. For those not fully familiar with the FCC broadband maps, the agency publishes two maps: the more familiar one that shows broadband coverage and a second that shows cellular coverage. You can toggle between the two maps at the FCC’s map website.

It struck me while looking at the details in the maps that rural cellular coverage is changing, and not in a good way. I started by looking at a small section of the county that is on the outer fringe of where the Asheville outer suburbs turn rural. According to the FCC cellular map, the area I selected has the following cellular coverage:

These two tables tell me the following:

  • AT&T and Verizon have some 4G coverage. But the Verizon coverage is likely very weak since they don’t claim it will work in a moving vehicle. While AT&T claims its 4G coverage will work in a moving vehicle, it’s curious that AT&T doesn’t have 5G. This tells me that the AT&T signal is also likely weak since it is outside the 5G coverage area.
  • The only carrier claiming relatively solid 5G (35/3 Mbps) is Project Genesis, which is EchoStar. The company has exited the facility-based cellular business and is in the process of dismantling cell sites.
  • T-Mobile claims both 4G and 5G for outdoor cellular coverage, but doesn’t claim it can work in a moving vehicle, meaning the coverage is also probably weak.
  • The last carrier listed is UScellular, which claims 7/1 speeds on 5G, but doesn’t claim to be able to provide coverage in vehicles. UScellular was purchased by T-Mobile, and the rumor is that any UScellular towers that already duplicate T-Mobile coverage are likely to be decommissioned.

The bottom line is that this particular neighborhood has weak cell coverage. The only carrier that claimed to be able to deliver 5G to a moving vehicle is now out of business.

I picked this neighborhood at random, but I think I would find the same story in most of the areas on the fringe of the metropolitan area. The coverage in areas that are completely rural is worse. The story I gleaned from this neighborhood is troublesome for several reasons.

  • The folks who live here don’t have a lot of options. The only carrier that might work in the way people need cellular to work is AT&T, but this neighborhood is outside the AT&T 5G coverage, and the 4G coverage is likely weak.
  • It looks like decent coverage was finally becoming available from EchoStar, but that’s now gone.
  • The speeds shown in the table are for outdoor coverage, and speeds inside homes are typically half of outdoor speeds.
  • When you look at the details in the FCC cellular map you quickly understand how the advertised national footprints of the big carriers are exaggerated.
  • The bad news is that the FCC considers this neighborhood to be served by cellular. That means if the FCC finally launches the 5G Fund for Rural America, this neighborhood will not be considered for funding to add a new cell tower.

A New Voice Feature

T-Mobile is currently beta testing a real-time translation service for T-Mobile cellular customers. The service will offer translations between fifty languages. The company is touting this as the first real-time agentic AI platform used on a wireless network.

There are already a lot of translator services available today like Google Translate, JotMe, Wordly.ai, Maestro AI, and others. The advantage of the T-Mobile offering is that it would a built-in feature that comes embedded with cellular service – a device that billions of people carry around all day.

It will be interesting to see how the beta test goes, because the biggest challenge of any translation service is to be able to translate quickly enough not to introduce big pauses into a conversation. Failure to do that makes a conversation feel robotic. Meeting that kind of real-time requirement will require low latency on the network as well as software that can translate quickly somewhere in the backend.

This is the first significant new voice feature I can remember that has been introduced since talk-to-text was introduced by Apple Siri in 2011. This is an amazing use of AI. For Star Trek nerds like me, this is the first baby step towards a universal translator. This feature, if it works as promised, will make it lot easier for people around the world to communicate.

One of the best parts of this feature is that it’s not tied to having a T-Mobile smartphone that requires specific software. The translations are done in the cloud, and T-Mobile says this can be made to work on any phone used by a T-Mobile customer, including flip-phones.

I keep hearing that the telecom companies are integrating AI into their businesses. It’s easy to see the AI agents that are popping up on customer service screens. Most of the articles and reviews I read say that a lot of people are unwilling to interact with AI agents, and it’s going to be interesting to see how big companies react if their customers won’t use the AI tools the companies prefer.

Much of the AI being introduced by telecom companies is being done out of sight. Industry technical news keeps describing initiatives for network owners to use AI to better manage networks. I’ve written a few blogs about this topic, and I suspect that reliance on AI instead of experienced technicians is a contributing factor to the big national network and service outages and contributes to it taking longer than suspected to diagnose and clear problems.

If AI is going to win over a lot of people if it can be used for features that people want to use. In today’s world, a lot of people know people who aren’t conversant in English. An easy real-time translator service would quickly broaden the horizon for a lot of us.

It’s certainly a marketing coup for T-Mobile if this works and if it takes others a while to offer a competitive alternative.The most interesting question for me is what’s next – what other AI features are on the way?

Supreme Court Examines FCC’s Ability to Fine

The Supreme Court has accepted a case that will determine the FCC’s ability to levy fines against the companies it regulates. The lower court cases that brought the issue to the Supreme Court come from fines that the FCC levied against AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon after the companies sold customer location data. The FCC said that the carriers did not properly vet the companies that bought customer data, and that many of those companies widely resold the data.

The Fifth Circuit Court sided with AT&T and said that the FCC’s process was unconstitutional. The Second Circuit Court sided with the FCC when reviewing the Verizon fine. The DC Circuit also sided with the FCC when reviewing the fine against T-Mobile.  As often happens when lower courts issue conflicting rulings, the Supreme Court has agreed to review the findings of the lower courts.

The Circuit Court cases invoked a Supreme Court ruling in 2024 in the case of SEC v Jaresky. In that case, the defendant was accused of committing fraud and misrepresenting himself to investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Mr. Jaresky $300,000 and ordered him to disgorge the unlawful profits he made of $685,000. Mr. Jaresky appealed to the Supreme Court and argued that the SEC didn’t have the regulatory authority to directly fine him, and that the SEC had violated his right to a jury trial.

The Supreme Court surprisingly sided with Jaresky and ordered that he should have been given the option for a jury trial rather than a trial by an SEC administrative judge. It was obvious after the Jaresky ruling that companies that were fined by other regulatory agencies would make the same claim if they were denied the right of a jury trial. In this case, the three cellular companies made the argument that the FCC fines were unconstitutional and got contradictory rulings from different lower courts. It’s fairly obvious that the carriers went to different courts hoping for conflicting rulings.

This is a major case for the FCC, since a ruling against it eliminates its ability to fine regulated companies for violating FCC rules. The ability to levy fines has always been one of the agency’s most effective enforcement tools and is one of the few remedies that is less drastic than yanking an FCC license to operate. The FCC has been using fines a lot recently in its attempt to cut down on robocalls and texts. The FCC will become a fairly toothless regulatory agency without the ability to levy fines. Carriers, both large and small, will be less afraid to violate FCC rules if they don’t fear that their violation would warrant a referral to the Justice Department.

This is a really interesting tactic by the cellular carriers. If these particular cases had been referred to a jury instead of an administrative judge, it’s not hard to imagine the fines being a lot larger. It’s not hard to imagine a jury that doesn’t like the idea of a giant corporation selling data that shows everywhere they travel with their cellphone.

This also opens up the possibility of State regulators tackling these kinds of issues and issuing fines if the FCC finds itself unable to do so. I have to think that selling customer data violates the law in multiple states.

If the Jaresky case is the precedent, then it’s hard to think the Court won’t side with the carriers and rule against the FCC. This Supreme Court seems to be very much against what they view as regulatory overstepping of authority, and the Jaresky case is only one of their rulings that are weakening federal regulatory agencies.

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.