T-Mobile now boasts a million 5G FWA customers

5G
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

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.”

Steve McCaskill is TechRadar Pro's resident mobile industry expert, covering all aspects of the UK and global news, from operators to service providers and everything in between. He is a former editor of Silicon UK and journalist with over a decade's experience in the technology industry, writing about technology, in particular, telecoms, mobile and sports tech, sports, video games and media. 

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