T-Mobile USA has revealed it now has one million 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband customers and has extended availability to another ten million households.
The service, which launched a year ago, is now available to 40 million households across the US, offering a genuine alternative to fixed line broadband.
In lieu of a physical connection to the Internet, such as fibre or cable, FWA uses a mobile network to power a router that provides a similar experience to fixed line connectivity.
5G FWA broadband
The advantage of 5G FWA is that it can deliver superfast, and even ultrafast, broadband services in hard-to-reach areas and provide greater flexibility and competition in urban areas.
Although 4G has been used to power FWA, 5G is a significant boost to the technology because of the additional speed and capacity – enabled by high-band and long-range spectrum – that next-generation networks provide.
This is especially true in the US, where several major cities are served by a single operator, and where mobile operators are offering 5G FWA using millimetre wave (mmWave) spectrum.
T-Mobile has celebrated the milestone in typically bullish fashion, declaring it expecptects to have between seven and eight million FWA customers by 2025.
“T-Mobile’s remarkable growth in broadband – a market that’s full of big behemoth corporations – just underscores how hungry customers are for a real alternative to the Carriers and the Landline ISPs,” said Mike Sievert, T-Mobile CEO.
“We launched into broadband last year with a radically new value prop that’s completely disrupted this category, and now, with a household footprint that’s millions larger than the nearest fixed wireless competitor.”