C-Band is a Huge Deal for Verizon: Extends Home Broadband Addressable Market from 25% to Virtually 100%

One iron rule for internet access services is that if one has enough bandwidth, access speeds can be very high. For mobile operators, bandwidth expansion can come in a few ways: adding more spectrum, building smaller cells or deploying better modulation techniques or radios.

In that regard, for 5G, mid-band spectrum has been key for firms such as Verizon, which have had less mid-band spectrum than others. The difference is striking. 

After deploying C-band spectrum, Verizon mobile peak speeds “go from 9 Mbps to an amazing 2.4 gigabits per second,” said Hans Vestberg, Verizon CEO.

That has implications for home broadband as well, as, in principle, peak speeds might reach gigabit per second levels. And that, in turn, is important because it dramatically extends the addressable market for fixed wireless from perhaps 25 percent of buyers to perhaps 99 percent of buyers (those who buy home broadband at speeds up to about 2 Gbps, and do not require symmetrical access)

True, Verizon has millimeter wave assets to deploy in urban areas, but C-band means fixed wireless has higher bandwidth in suburban and rural areas as well. 

For Verizon, which has a smaller fixed network footprint than many of its leading competitors, that really does matter, as it means Verizon can compete for home broadband customers who want higher speeds in most U.S. geographic areas. 

Of a total of 140 million U.S.  homes, AT&T’s landline network passes 62 million. 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.

The number of Verizon homes passed might be 27 million. Lumen Technologies never reports its homes-passed figures, but likely has 20-million or so consumer locations.

The point is that Verizon cannot easily expand its fiber to home footprint outside its historic service areas, for reasons of investment magnitude. So fixed wireless makes eminent sense for a firm that can presently reach only about 19 percent of U.S. homes using its fixed network. 

The same sort of logic holds for T-Mobile, which historically has had zero access network fixed network footprint. There is neither time nor money for T-Mobile to wire the entire country, or even a substantial part of it, using FTTH. 

So C-band is a really big deal. It extends Verizon’s home broadband addressable market from about 25 percent of homes to up to 100-percent of homes.