Tag Archives: Verizon

FWA Cellular Speeds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Happened to Quantum Networks?

A few years ago, there were a lot of predictions that we’d see broadband networks converting to quantum technology because of the enhanced security. As happens with many new technologies, quantum computing is advancing at a slower pace than the wild predictions that accompanied the launch of the new technology.

What are quantum computing and quantum networks? The computers we use today are all Turing machines that convert data into bits represented by either a 1 or a 0 and then process data linearly through algorithms. Quantum computing takes advantage of a property found in subatomic particles called superposition, meaning that particles can operate simultaneously in more than one state, such as an electron that is at two different levels. Quantum computing mimics this subatomic world by creating what are called qubits, which can exist as both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. One cubit can perform two calculations at once, but when many cubits are used simultaneously, the number of simultaneous calculations grows exponentially. A four-cubit computer can perform 24 or 16 calculations at the same time. Some quantum computers are currently capable of 1,000 cubits, or 21000 simultaneous calculations.

We are starting to see quantum computing in the telecom space. In 2020, Verizon conducted a network trial using quantum key distribution technology (QKD). This uses a method of encryption that might be unhackable. Photons are sent one at a time alongside an encrypted fiber optic transmission. If anybody attempts to intercept or listen to the encrypted light stream, the polarization of the photons is impacted, and the sender and receiver of the message both know instantly that the transmission is no longer safe. The theory is that this will stop hackers before they can learn enough to crack into and analyze a data stream. Verizon also added a second layer of security using a quantum random number generator that updates the encryption key randomly in a way that can’t be predicted.

A few months ago, EPB, the municipal fiber provider in Chattanooga, announced a partnership with Qubitekk to let customers on the City’s fiber network connect to a quantum computer. The City is hoping to attract companies to the City that want to benefit from quantum computing. The City has already heard from Fortune 500 companies, startups, and government agencies that are interested in using the quantum computer links.

EBP has established the quantum network separate from its last-mile network to accommodate the special needs of a quantum network transmission. The quantum network uses more than 200 existing dark fibers to establish customer links on the quantum network. EPB engineers will constantly monitor the entangled particles on the quantum network.

Quantum computing is most useful for applications that require large numbers of rapid calculations. For example, quantum computing could produce faster and more detailed weather maps in real time. Quantum computing is being used in research on drugs or exotic materials where scientists can compare multiple complex molecular structures easily. One of the most interesting current uses is that quantum computing can greatly speed up the processing power of artificial intelligence that is now sweeping the world.

It doesn’t look like quantum networking is coming to most fiber networks any time soon. The biggest holdup is the creation of efficient and cost-effective quantum computers. Today, most of these computers are in labs at universities or government facilities. The potential for quantum computing is so large that the technology could explode onto the scene when the hardware issue is solved.

A Tale of Two Markets

I wrote a blog the other day that got me thinking about the huge disparity in regulating two distinct but highly intertwined industries – broadband and voice. Before you stop reading because you might think voice is no longer relevant, voice regulation includes the cellular business, and in terms of revenue, the voice market is larger than broadband. JD Powers reported in April of this year that the average household is spending $144 for cellular per month.

I call these industries intertwined because the players at the top of both industries are the same. The big ISPs are Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon. The biggest voice players are AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Comcast and Charter are making aggressive moves to develop a wireless business, and T-Mobile is aggressively selling broadband.

The two markets are intertwined in a household. Most people connect their cell phones directly to landline broadband when they are home. The primary use for cell phones is to connect to the Internet. My twenty-something daughter is amazed that I predominantly use my cell phone to actually talk to people.

This handful of giant companies control the lion’s shares of both the voice and broadband industries. Yet we’ve decided to regulate the two business lines completely differently. You must admit that this it’s an odd national decision to regulate AT&T’s voice business but not its broadband business, particularly considering how intertwined the two businesses are. Comcast and Charter are proof of the link between the two industries since the companies will only sell cellular plans to customers who are buying broadband.

A regulatory expert from another country would look at the U.S. regulatory environment with incredulity. They would instantly wonder how we can treat the two industries so differently since they engage in such similar business lines, particularly since the same companies lead both markets.

The average American has no idea of how differently we treat the two industries and would be just as confused as a foreign regulator expert. It’s really hard to explain the difference in regulations since that quickly devolves into a discussion of things like Title II regulation, and the average person listening will quickly have no idea what you are talking about.

The easiest way to explain the difference in regulation is that we don’t regulate according to common sense but base regulation on the original legislation that established regulations for each industry. Voice is still regulated because, in the past, various pieces of federal legislation, like the Telecommunications Act of 1996, specifically mention voice. There were also laws that specifically defined how to regulate cable TV – but there has never been a definitive legislative declaration that broadband must be regulated.

This all started when interest in home broadband mushroomed. AOL, CompuServe, and others created a robust ISP industry that took off rapidly when DSL and cable modems increased speed to the point that people could do useful things with broadband. In those early days, there was a lot of discussion about regulating broadband, but the consensus among legislators was that regulators should leave the fledgling new broadband industry alone until it grew large enough. No doubt, this hands-off approach was whispered into the ears of legislators by lobbyists for the big ISPs.

With no direction from Congress, the FCC and various States tried to find ways to regulate broadband over the last few decades. But as hard as it is to believe, we weren’t even able to define what broadband is without legislative direction – is broadband a telecommunications service or an information service? All of the wrangling about regulating broadband ultimately comes down to this simple designation.

Regulation gets really bizarre the deeper you go into the details. Cell phones calls are regulated for voice, but the broadband on a cellphone is considered to be an information service. What is the regulatory regime of a cell phone call that is handed off to a broadband network through WiFi but then eventually reconnected with the cellular network? The average cell phone user regularly bounces between regulated and unregulated functions.

The title of the blog refers to A Tale of Two Cities, which opened with, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness”. That’s as good of a description of our odd regulatory environment as anything else I can think of.

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.

Should We Trust the Companies that Created the Digital Divide?

For those of you who don’t know Bruce Kushnick, he’s been tracking the promises made and broken by Verizon since the 1990s and written extensively on the issue. His latest article is “NTIA: Require Every State Broadband Agency to Investigate Those Responsible for Creating the State’s Digital Divide.”

Bruce has been arguing eloquently for years that the big telcos like Verizon, AT&T, and CenturyLink caused the rural digital divide by extracting profits from the regulated telephone and broadband businesses in rural and low-income areas while neglecting maintenance and not using any of the profits to modernize the technology. According to Bruce, the only reason we need massive federal grant programs today is to make the investments that the big telcos refused to make for the last several decades.

He argues that the NTIA should require states to investigate how the digital divide was created in rural areas and center cities. He uses the two examples of New Jersey and Los Angeles to make his point. He’s been tracking the promises made by Verizon to the State of New Jersey for the last thirty years. Verizon repeatedly sought regulatory relief through deregulation along with rate increases that were supposed to fund modernizing the network in the State – upgrades that were never done. When Verizon finally upgraded to fiber, it did so only in neighborhoods with the lowest costs, avoiding rural areas and most low-income neighborhoods.

I’ve been tracking this issue during my career as well. Consider West Virginia. I remember when Verizon was looking for a buyer of the telco network there as far back as the early 1990s. When big companies are trying to sell a property, they do what valuation folks call ‘dressing up the pig”. This means cutting expenses to make the property look more profitable. The cuts are usually deep, and drop maintenance below the level needed to keep up with routine repairs and maintenance.

Verizon didn’t end up selling the West Virginia network until the sale to Frontier in 2010. By then, the networks had been neglected for more than fifteen years. Frontier made only minimal upgrades to the properties they purchased – but it’s hard for an outsider to know if this was due to an intention to continue to milk cash flow out of the acquired network like Verizon had done or due to a lack of the capital and impact of the heavy debt used to buy the property. In any case, the West Virginia network continued to degrade under Frontier’s ownership.

For years, Bruce has made the point that there has not been any financial or regulatory cost to the big telcos for their bad behavior. They’ve repeatedly broken promises made to states. They’ve routinely milked profits out of networks while ignoring customers as the properties deteriorate.

In fact, we’ve seen the opposite of penalties. For example, the big telcos were rewarded with over $10 billion of CAF-II subsidies to support dying and neglected rural DSL networks. That money was supposed to be used to increase rural data speeds to 10/1 Mbps at a time when that speed was already obsolete. We’ve seen far too many places where even that basic upgrade was not made.

Bruce’s conclusion is that it would be ludicrous to give grant funding now to the companies that caused the digital divide in the first place. That would be using public money to upgrade the networks for these companies when profits should have been used over the decades to do so. He makes a solid argument that giving money to these same companies will not solve the digital divide since there is no reason to think the big telcos won’t turn around and do it all over again.

A Last Gasp at Regulating Copper

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission recently ordered a series of public hearings to investigate the quality of service on the CenturyLink copper networks. The hearings were prompted by a complaint filed by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The complaint listed the failures of CenturyLink to meet state service standards due to the deterioration of the copper network. CWA also noted that CenturyLink is planning to eliminate half of the remaining technicians who work on copper.

Similar inquiries by other state regulators have been instituted in the last few years against CenturyLink and Frontier. I feel sorry for any customers left on deteriorating copper networks, but proceedings like this one feel like the last gasp of regulators trying to score points by beating up on the telcos that still operate copper networks.

Not that CenturyLink doesn’t deserve a lot of criticism. Its copper networks are in dreadful condition and are in the process of dying. The poor condition of the networks is due in large part to the decades-long lack of maintenance and repairs. We know this is the case because copper networks of a similar age are still operating much better in Europe. The big telcos like CenturyLink, Frontier, Verizon, and AT&T stopped caring about copper networks back in the 1990s, and the networks have been in a steady decline since then.

But U.S. copper networks are truly near the end of life. It’s impossible to neglect maintenance for over twenty years and somehow suddenly make the networks perform better. It’s hard to fathom the intentions of having regional hearings on the topic for any purpose other than letting people vent their frustration with CenturyLink. It’s hard to imagine anything changing as a result of these hearings that will improve service. There might be new fines levied on CenturyLink, but that’s less costly for the company than trying to make the copper work.

Some big telcos are working to convert copper networks to fiber. Frontier and Windstream are building a lot of fiber – and I assume they are overlashing the new fiber wires on the old copper. AT&T and Verizon are selectively expanding fiber in neighborhoods where the cost of construction meets some internally set cost test – but these two companies are quietly moving most copper customers onto cellular connections.

CenturyLink has been up and down on the decision to overbuild residential fiber. It currently looks like the company is only building ‘strategic’ fiber, which I interpret to mean business districts and large apartment complexes. It seems unlikely that CenturyLink will overbuild much more of its residential copper in Minnesota or elsewhere with fiber.

I would bet that if CenturyLink could wave a magic wand and be rid of copper, it would do so. It’s harder each year to maintain copper networks, and a move to eliminate half of the remaining copper technicians shows that the company is finally throwing in the towel. But giving up on copper still means walking away from a lot of revenue.

There are still plenty of customers who want to keep using the copper networks. Say what you want about the inadequacies of DSL, but in most urban markets where my firm does surveys, we still find 10% to 20% of households are still using DSL. These are households for whom the price is more important than broadband speed.

CenturyLink and the other big telcos have recaptured the cost of the copper networks many times over and decided many years ago not to reinvest profits back into new and upgraded networks. We’re now reduced to watching the last death throes of copper networks, and it’s not pretty.

Will Cellular Companies Pursue BEAD Grants?

Several people have asked me recently if cellular companies will be pursuing BEAD grants. It’s an interesting question that I don’t think anybody other than the cellular carriers know the answer. But it’s an intriguing question since it’s a possibility.

Until recently, cellular companies didn’t have a product that would have qualified for broadband grants. BEAD and other grants are awarded to ISPs that serve homes an businesses, not cell phones. But the introduction of the FWA product line has created a broadband product that might qualify for grants.

Cellular companies pass the first sniff for BEAD grants since the wireless technology uses licensed spectrum. The NTIA says it does not consider wireless broadband using public spectrum to be reliable.

The next hurdle to winning grant funding would be for cellular companies to convince state grant offices that they can deliver broadband speeds greater than 100/20 Mbps. That’s an interesting challenge for a cellular carrier. From what I’ve seen, customers living close to a cell site can easily exceed those speeds. I’ve talked to a few people getting over 200 Mbps download on FWA – but each happened to live close to a cell site.

But speeds on FWA decrease rapidly with distance. I’ve talked to customers who are less than two miles from a cell site and aren’t seeing download speeds of 100 Mbps. But that doesn’t disqualify a cellular carrier from pursuing grants. BEAD allows for grants that cover small areas, theoretically as small as a single home.

More interestingly, there is no reason that a cellular company couldn’t propose a grant to build new towers to expand the faster coverage and also the fiber lines to feed the towers. It’s not hard to picture a network in rural areas where this might be the lowest cost solution. One has to wonder if a cellular company would ever want such a network – that’s a lot of cell sites to maintain that likely each only serve a small number of customers.

Another issue to consider is that cellular carriers are currently providing priority to cell phones over FWA customers. If the network gets busy, cell phones customers get the requested broadband, and FWA customers get throttled. Broadband offices might deem this to be disqualifying in areas with any significant population – but this seems like far less of a concern in a rural setting where cell sites probably rarely get overstressed.

Yet another issue is the ability of a grant winner to serve everybody in the footprint. Unless a grant area has extremely low density, it’s likely that the cell site doesn’t have the capacity to give everybody unlimited home broadband.

Another interesting issue to consider is how mapping plays into this. I’ve heard a lot of comments from folks who are claiming that T-Mobile and Verizon are already claiming fast speeds in a lot of places. Folks are saying the coverage areas claimed in the FCC maps seem a lot larger than the reality. It’s not hard to understand the motivations for cellular companies to claim fast speeds since it helps with marketing. This is particularly important for T-Mobile, which reached an agreement with the government as a condition of the Sprint merger to cover a large percentage of the country with faster speeds.

But claiming high speeds and claiming coverage areas that are larger than reality are counterproductive to seeking grants. An ISP can’t ask for grant funding for a place it says already has fast broadband.

The more important question for the industry is how the FWA claims of current speeds and coverage might hurt other grants. Will broadband offices not award grants in places the cellular companies claim to already have fast broadband? The emergence of the FWA technology is so new that I suspect most state broadband offices haven’t come to grips with that question. Many states have been creating their own broadband maps in recent years, and FWA technology has not been factored into those maps. This is just one more complication for broadband offices – as if they needed another issue.

Who’s On First?

I saw a short article in Business Wire that said that Comcast Business had landed a project to provide a private wireless network for the guests of The Sound Hotel Seattle Belltown. This is an example of the continuing convergence in the industry where the big cable companies, ISPs, and wireless carriers are freely competing on each other’s turf. For decades we’ve neatly categorized companies as telcos, cable companies, or wireless carriers, but this convenient categorization is starting to fray around the edges, and its getting a lot harder to distinguish between the big industry players.

If we look back ten or fifteen years, the distinctions between these companies were clearly defined. The big telcos served residences and small businesses using DSL. The big telcos were clearly structured in silos. There was practically no interface between the wireless companies at Verizon and AT&T and the broadband business. Verizon went so far as to set up Verizon FiOS, its fiber business, separately in every aspect from the copper and DSL business.

The cable companies had faster broadband than DSL after the upgrades were made to DOCSIS 3.0. Speeds up to 300-400 Mbps blew away the capabilities of DSL. Once those upgrades were completed, the cable companies took market share in cities from the telcos year after year until the cable companies had a near-monopoly in many markets.

The market with more balanced competition has been the large business market. This is the market where fiber quickly became king. At one point the telcos controlled most of this market, with their fiercest competition coming from a handful of big CLECs. Verizon responded to this competition by buying MCI, XO, and others in the northeast. CenturyLink become one of the nationwide market leaders through the acquisition of Qwest and then Level 3. The big cable companies cautiously launched fiber ventures for this market twenty years ago and have picked up a decent market share.

But those simple explanations of the business plans of the big ISPs is now history. As the Business Wire announcement showed, the big companies are crossing technology barriers in new ways. Comcast

Providing a private wireless network for a large hotel is emblematic of a new trend in competition. In doing this, Comcast is crossing technical lines that it would never have considered years ago. From a business perspective, Comcast is going after the full suite of services for businesses like this hotel, not just the wireless network. The newest word in the competitive market is stickiness, and Comcast is likely tying down this hotel as a customer for a long time, assuming it does a great job.

These crossovers are even more evident in the residential and small business markets. Comcast, Charter, and other cable companies are bundling cellular service with broadband and the triple play, something that the telcos have never managed to pull off. Telcos have decided to reclaim urban market share by building huge amounts of fiber. And the cable companies are reacting to that threat by rushing some early versions of DOCSIS 4.0 to the market in order to fix the upload bandwidth issues. The big wireless companies have joined the fray with the FWA cellular wireless broadband products. While these products can’t compete with the bandwidth on fiber or cable networks, the product is still adequate for many homes and hits the market at a much lower price.

This has to be confusing to the average residential consumer. Consumers who abandoned DSL years ago are being lured back by to the telcos by fiber. Folks who have been paying far too much for cellular service are moving to the more affordable cable company wireless service. And people who can’t afford the high price of cable broadband are seemingly flocking to the more affordable FWA wireless. I have to imagine that the customer service desks at the various ISPs are being flooded by customers canceling service to try something different.

Markets always eventually reach an equilibrium. But for now, both the residential and business markets in many cities are seeing a fresh new marketing efforts. A decade from now, it’s likely that we’ll reach a predicable mix of the various technologies. We know this from having watched the markets where Verizon FiOS battled with the cable companies for several decades. But much of the country is just now entering the era of refreshed competition.

Unfortunately, this new competition isn’t everywhere. There is already evidence that new investments are not being made at the same pace in lower-income neighborhoods. Some cities are seeing widespread fiber construction while others are seeing almost none. There will still be a lot of work to do to make sure that everybody gets a shot at the best broadband – but the obvious convergence in the industry shows that we’re headed in the right direction.

What Happened to Verizon Fiber-to-the-Curb?

Back in 2018, Verizon got a lot of press for the release of a fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) technology it called Verizon Home. The first big test market was Sacramento. The company built fiber along residential streets and used wireless loops to reach homes. At the time, Verizon touted speeds of 300 Mbps but said that it was shooting for gigabit speeds using millimeter-wave spectrum. Verizon tried to make this a self-installed product, and customers got instructions on how to place the receiver in different windows facing the street to find the best reception and speeds.

There were quotes from the time that Verizon intended to build fiber to pass 25 million homes by 2025 with the technology. But then the product went quiet. In 2020, the Verizon Home product reappeared, but it is a totally different product that uses cellular spectrum from cell towers to bring broadband. This is the product that the industry is categorizing as FWA (fixed wireless access). The company no longer quotes a target broadband speed and instead sayshttps://www.verizon.com/5g/home/ “Verizon 5G Home is reliable and fast to power your whole home with lots of devices connected. So all of your TVs, tablets, phones, gaming consoles and more run on the ultra-fast and reliable Verizon network.” In looking through some Ookla speed tests for the FWA product, it looks like download speeds are in the 100 – 150 Mbps range – but like any cellular product, the speed varies by household according to the distance between a customer and the transmitter and other local conditions.

The new cellular-based product has gone gangbusters, and Verizon had over one million customers on the product by the end of the third quarter of 2022, having sold 342,000 new customers in that quarter. The relaunch of the product was confusing because the company took the unusual step of using the same product name and website when it switched to the wireless product. It even kept the same prices.

But the two products are day and night different. Verizon’s original plan was to pass millions of homes with a broadband product that was fast enough to be a serious competitor to cable broadband. Even if the product never quite achieved gigabit speeds, it was going to be fast enough to be a lower-priced competitor to cable companies.

While the new Verizon Home product is selling quickly, the product is not close in capabilities to the FTTC product. Cellular bandwidth is never going to be as reliable as a landline technology or one where fiber is as close as the curb. Verizon (and T-Mobile) have both made it clear that the FWA customers will take second priority for bandwidth availability behind cell phone customers. I don’t know that these companies could do it any other way – they can’t jeopardize unhappiness from a hundred million cellular customers to serve a much smaller number of FWA customers.

I think everybody understands the way that cellular broadband capabilities change during the day. We all see it as the bars of 4G or 5G at our homes bounce up and down based on a variety of factors such as weather, temperature, and the general network usage in the immediate neighborhood. The most interesting thing about being a broadband customer on a cellular network is that the experience is unique to every customer. The reception will vary according to the distance from the cell tower or small cell and the amount of clutter and interference in a given neighborhood from foliage and other buildings.

I expect that large bandwidth users will get frustrated with the variability of the signal and eventually go back to a landline technology. The FWA product is mostly aimed at bringing broadband to rural customers who have no better broadband alternative or to folks in towns for whom saving money is more important than performance. There are a lot of such people who have stuck with DSL for years rather than upgrading to the more expensive cable broadband, and these are the likely target for FWA. In fact, FWA might finally let the telcos turn off DSL networks.

Verizon says it’s still on track with what it calls the One Fiber initiative which is aimed at building Verizon-owned fiber to cell towers and small cell sites. This backbone was likely the planned starting point for neighborhood fiber, but now this is mostly a cost-cutting step to stop paying fiber leases.

Fearing the Competition

Over the last six months, practically every big carrier in the industry has made a formal announcement that they are not worried about specific competitors. The latest one I read was in LightReading where Nick Jeffery of Frontier said he’s not worried about competition from the cable companies upgrading to DOCSIS 4.0 or from cellular carriers offering FWA home broadband. Frontier is building a lot of fiber, and Jeffery was commenting that he thinks fiber is a superior technology compared to the alternatives. To be honest, this might be the only claim I read where the ISP was being truthful. Frontier has been at the bottom of the heap in the industry for many years and led in the percentage lost broadband and cable TV customers quarter after quarter. It’s got to be refreshing for the company to be deploying a technology that gives it a fighting chance to succeed.

I’m not citing all of the other CEOs that said the same thing – but these announcements were pretty much across the board – basically, no carrier is afraid of other competitors.

I’ve seen all of the big cable companies quoted as saying they aren’t afraid of FWA cellular broadband. And yet, in the second quarter of this year, T-Mobile and Verizon added over 800,000 new customers, while the large cable companies collectively lost 150,000 customers during the quarter. The cable companies rightfully say they have superior technology when competing against 100 Mbps download speeds, but the FWA cellular carriers have much lower rates and are attracting customers who think that cable broadband costs too much.

The big telcos that are building fiber have all made the same claim about not fearing FWA wireless. The big telcos collectively lost less than 100,000 customers in the second quarter of this year, the best they’ve done in ages. The small loss disguises the fact that the telcos continue to lose DSL customers but are largely replacing them with fiber customers – except Lumen, which had a net customer loss for the quarter of 93,000.

I’ve seen most of the big fiber overbuilders scorning cable company broadband and saying they aren’t worried about DOCSIS 4.0 – like Frontier said. That’s a fairly easy thing not to fear for now since we’re a number of years away from any conversions to DOCSIS 4.0. But Comcast and others are talking about soon introducing some of the higher split technologies on DOCSIS 3.1 to boost upload speeds sooner. Will fiber overbuilders fear the cable companies more after some upgrades?

The WISPs that will be installing new versions of fixed wireless, including some technologies that claim to be able to deliver speeds up to a gigabit, say they are not afraid of competing against rural fiber networks built with grant funding. That’s an interesting claim since the general public seems to have grasped that fiber is better. It will be interesting to see what happens in places where rural fiber competes against fast rural broadband.

The big three cellular carriers all claim they are not afraid of Dish Network becoming the fourth major cellular carrier. It’s an odd claim to make since Dish says the only way for it to gain market share is to be extremely aggressive with prices. The cellular industry is already highly competitive, and it can’t be good for any of the bigger carriers to have to lower rates.

I get a chuckle every time I read one of these statements because when a carrier goes out of its way to mention a competitor, it is worried. The reality is that every carrier in a competitive situation has to be concerned about competitors. In the end, this is a battle that is going to be fought at the local level, market by market. I can picture that the various technologies will get a different reception depending on local factors. But for now, apparently, nobody fears the competition.