In the recent third quarter earnings call, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg expressed strong support and belief in the future of the company’s FWA wireless broadband product. This product provides home and business broadband that uses the same cellular spectrum used today to provide bandwidth for cellphones.
There is good reason for the company to be optimistic about the broadband product. In only a few short years the company has added almost 2.7 million FWA customers, and most of its broadband customer growth in the third quarter of this year came from FWA. As noted by Vestberg, rapid growth has continued even after the company increased the price of the product by $10 per month.
As I have addressed in several blogs, there are some limitations on the current FWA product. The biggest downside is that the fast speeds advertised for FWA by Verizon and T-Mobile are only available for customers that live within a mile or so of a cell tower. Speeds seem to cut in half in the second mile from a tower and drop significantly by the third mile.
Another drawback is that both Verizon and T-Mobile throttle the bandwidth for FWA any time that cellphone usage gets heavy. In scouring through multiple speed tests, we have found customers who vary between fast and extremely slow speeds – which might be evidence of this throttling.
But Vestberg mentioned a big technology boost that will be coming to the Verizon FWA product. Verizon purchased a lot of C-Band spectrum in an FCC auction in 2021. This is spectrum that sits between 3.7 GHz and 3.98 GHz. The licensed spectrum provides Verizon with anywhere from 140 MHz to 200 MHz of cellular bandwidth in markets across the country.
Vestberg says the company is starting to upgrade busy urban towers with the extra C-Band spectrum. He implied that the upgrades will be coming to other urban towers and some suburban towers in 2024.
He said the C-Band spectrum will double or triple the cellular bandwidth depth in most markets. He said that using the new spectrum for FWA could result in speeds as fast as 900 Mbps to 2.4 Gbps. Like all speed claims made by ISPs, those speeds are likely faster than anybody will see in real life and probably represent theoretical maximums. However, FWA users can expect a big boost in speeds, particularly those living near towers.
I have to assume that Verizon has already built C-Band capabilities into its home FWA receivers, so speed upgrades ought to be realized immediately after an upgrade. A lot of the newest cell phones also already include C-Band capabilities. Verizon seems to have the most aggressive plan for C-Band, but AT&T has started to deploy the spectrum in a few markets. T-Mobile owns C-Band spectrum, but still seems to be hanging on the sidelines for upgrades.
Significant speed increases to FWA can make the product into a potent competitor to cable companies, at least for customers within a close distance of a cellular tower. The FWA prices are far lower than the prices charged by the big cable companies for broadband, and fast speeds can make this a viable alternative.
The first generation of FWA has delivered speeds in the 100-300 Mbps range. That has been fast enough to attract millions of customers. But the first generation product has felt more like a big upgrade to DSL rather than a direct threat to cable companies. But if the current speeds are really doubled or tripled, many households are going to be attracted by the lower prices on FWA. It’s an interesting product to market since the attractiveness for customers is in a direct relationship to the strength of the cellular signal that reaches their home – an extremely local situation.