5G Carriers Covet Your Comcast Bill
With remote work an increasingly permanent fixture, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are shifting their ambitions from mobile phones to homes.
Zooming, booming home office setups and the rise of streaming-video services present a potential source of new customers.
Photographer: Hollie Adams/BloombergTV commercials for America’s biggest wireless network operators depict a world of lightning-fast, mobile 5G connections zipping around us wherever we go. More likely, though, this upgrade won’t be so revolutionary for the average smartphone user. Carriers are gearing up to pitch a version of 5G that’s neither lightning-fast nor mobile after the Covid-19 pandemic moved our most data-intensive needs indoors and away from offices. The result is that the latest industry buzzword is more of an early-2000s throwback: broadband. You may know it as home internet.
“Broadband” was mentioned more than 100 times during last week’s investor presentations by AT&T Inc., T-Mobile US Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. These companies are betting they can get millions of Americans to ditch home internet providers such as Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc. over the next few years. There are two basic ways they’re seeking to do this, depending on where you live: One is the expensive process of running miles of fiber-optic cables in underground trenches or on telephone poles. The other is something called fixed wireless, a way to beam signals over a carrier’s airwaves to a home antenna. (T-Mobile’s setup doesn’t even require a technician.) They are by no means targeting every home, but probably enough to make cable giants look over their shoulders.