Fixed wireless has become a hugely-important means for Verizon to expand its home broadband footprint. Over the last year, though the fiber to home footprint grew by 500,000 locations, the fixed wireless footprint added 11.6 million locations.
In fact, fixed wireless now accounts for about 41 percent of Verizon’s home broadband passings.
It remains to be seen how many customer accounts will be driven by fixed wireless, to be sure. But that big an increase in footprint--mostly outside its fixed network footprint--in just a year is significant.
Unless the marketing bundle and packaging are completely inept (and that does not seem the case), Verizon is going to start gaining market share in its fixed wireless areas. In the past, many observers have suggested fixed wireless suppliers can get take rates in the 15 percent to 20 percent range.
In a saturated market, those gains largely represent market share taken from another supplier. So the market share implications are quite significant, representing a change between 30 percent to 40 percent in overall share.
The expansion of millimeter radio and C-band radio assets will be important. Roughly half the U.S. home broadband base has been content to buy service in the 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps range. C-band will help boost fixed wireless into those ranges, while millimeter wave will enable speeds approaching the top tier of consumer demand (gigabit service).
Even where not yet available, services using 4G can support access at speeds between 25 Mbps and 50 Mbps.
Such lower-speed home broadband might appeal to customers content to purchase service operating at the lower ranges of bandwidths at or below 50 Mbps. That still represents 10.5 percent of the market, according to Openvault.
Combined with marketing by T-Mobile, we are going to get a good test of fixed wireless as a major platform for home broadband services in the U.S. market.
No comments:
Post a Comment