T-Mobile plans to launch fixed wireless broadband, company CEO John Legere said in a company blog post this week. The service will rely on both 4G and 5G technologies, Legere explained, but didn’t offer a firm timeline..
Legere promised to deliver 100+ Mbps speeds for wireless broadband to 90% of the population and in-home service to over half the country’s households by 2024. The company will provide customers with an in-house router that they can self-install with a mobile app.
“With the New T-Mobile and our unique 5G capabilities, we’ll be able to offer a fast and reliable alternative for in-home broadband,” Legere said. “In this digital economy, access to the internet has become critical to our everyday lives. For most American households today, the options for in-home broadband are scarce according to the most recent FCC data, 28.9% of U.S. households and 61.1% of rural households have no in-home broadband service or only one provider of in-home broadband. For high-speed in-home broadband of 100 Mbps, the picture is even bleaker. Almost half the country’s households – 45% – have no high-speed service or only one option to choose from. Of rural households, more than three quarters (76%) have no high-speed service or only one choice available.”
T-Mobile’s fixed broadband solution will offer rural consumers another option, Legere said, blasting lack of true competition among cable companies, saying that they don’t look to enter each other’s markets. “New T-Mobile’s business plan is to have 9.5 million customers for our in-home broadband service by 2024. We will bring competition.”
When and if T-Mobile and Sprint merge, the router will be upgraded to include 2.5 GHz spectrum and 5G compatible hardware, Legere added in the blog post. The concept could be seen as a strategy to help get the T-Mobile-Sprint merger over the regulatory finish line. Regulators like talk of additional competition.
Pioneer Cellular has been doing LTE-based fixed wireless here in northwest Oklahoma for a few years now. It works well, not broadband-replacement type speeds, but if there is no other option for internet service available to a particular user at their location, it can be a decent solution. They do not offer it everywhere of course, not all sites are provisioned for the service and they refuse to sell it to anyone not living in an area where they are the local wireline telephone provider, which leaves out vast areas where they only offer cellular service, and are only using their own spectrum for the service and not the Verizon 700 Mhz spectrum they are using in the LTE in Rural America program. Pioneer is currently shutting down all their copper-based DSL services, so I would expect this service to be expanded soon.