T-Mobile, Verizon Taking Different Tacks on Fixed Wireless: Moffett

Mid-band fixed wireless access from T-Mobile and Verizon “has emerged as perhaps the key controversy in broadband,” MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett told investors Tuesday. “Both companies have targeted broad rollouts and have set ambitious targets, and they have largely dismissed concerns about capacity constraints,” but neither offers much detail, he said. For T-Mobile, Comlinkdata’s data shows deployment skews “towards rural areas” with the “preponderance of subscribers … coming from areas where there is at least one robust competitive wired alternative,” he said. T-Mobile is “clearly being quite deliberate in where they accept new subscribers,” he said. “It is much harder to draw real insight from the Verizon FWA numbers, inasmuch as they apply only to Verizon’s relatively limited deployment of their [millimeter-wave] offering,” Moffett said: “Their subscribers necessarily skew towards dense areas, as the propagation of mmWave demands.”