AT&T does not believe that customers consuming between one and five terabytes of home broadband data will be best served by a mid-band fixed wireless home broadband product.
“Well, the large consumption that we are anticipating over the next five years will be hard to meet with a wireless-only solution,” said Scott McElfresh, AT&T Communications CEO. There will be places where fixed wireless does make sense, he added.
“There will be portions of the footprint that will not be economical to serve with fiber,” said McElfresh. “And we would intend to put at the edge of our fiber network this wireless C-band asset, along with our other mid-band spectrum to serve some of the limited use cases that we think are available for a fixed wireless solution.”
“But that's not our primary focus for that band, and that's not our primary focus to serve that heavy demand with broadband,” he noted.
At least in part, the issue is upstream bandwidth, where the difference between downstream data and upstream data has traditionally shown a 10:1 ratio. But AT&T CEO John Stankey argues that the ratio is heading to “something more like 5:1.”
As significant a change as that might be for a fixed network, the challenge is harder for a spectrum-constrained platform such as mobility, which never has the bandwidth provided by a cabled network.
As always, firm strategy hinges on supplier assessment of their own strengths and weaknesses. T-Mobile and Verizon have much more to gain from taking home broadband share than does AT&T, and fixed wireless is the fastest, most affordable way to do so.
T-Mobile has had zero market share in home broadband, as it has no retail fixed network business. Verizon has a retail fixed network business, but covers a small percentage of U.S. homes.
Both firms stand to gain millions of accounts--especially where they do not presently offer any service--using mobile or fixed wireless.
Comcast has (can actually sell service to) about 57 million homes passed.
The Charter Communications network passes about 50 million homes, the number of potential customer locations it can sell to.
Verizon homes passed might number 18.6 to 20 million. To be generous, use the 20 million figure.
AT&T’s fixed network represents perhaps 62 million U.S. homes passed. CenturyLink never reports its homes passed figures, but likely has 20-million or so consumer locations it can market services to.
T-Mobile and Verizon have the most market share to gain by deploying fixed wireless.
“We choose to serve our customers that demand high-speed bandwidth with fiber, and we will utilize our wireless networks to serve those other niche use cases in areas where fiber economics do not make sense,” said Jason Kilar, AT&T WarnerMedia CEO.
“We think that mid-band spectrum has its role,” said Stankey. “It has its role in being a premium mobility product.” But mid-band spectrum has issues supporting indoor coverage, he argued. “And we think there's better ways to kind of deal with what's going on inside most of the walls of society,” namely fiber to the premises.
All that can be reasonably argued. But McElfresh also said “our vision would be to have over half of our portfolio or 50 percent of our network covered by that fiber asset” by about 2025, building at about a three million to four million annual rate.
Proponents of fixed wireless might make exactly the same point: half of U.S. households buy broadband services running between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps, with perhaps 20 percent of demand requiring lower speeds than that.
So even if fixed wireless offers lower speeds than cable hybrid fiber coax or telco FTTH, it might arguably still address 70 percent of the U.S. market.
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