As upstart fixed wireless access services launched several years ago by T-Mobile and Verizon undercut them on price, robbed them of market share and ended their customer growth expansion, top cable executives adopted a “what, me worry?” posture.
Over time, they argued, 5G wireless won't have the capacity to keep up with the speed and quality demanded by consumers for 4K video streaming and other data-intensive tasks now conducted regularly in the American home.
OpenSignal’s latest Fixed Broadband Experience report, which analyzes key home internet qualitative factors for the five largest home-internet providers in America, may have just proven them right.
Drawn from a national sample, the report is, frankly, a little janky, as Verizon and AT&T’s metrics are culled from an odd mix of fast, reliable fiber-to-the-home internet, and lesser 4G FWA and legacy digital subscriber line (DSL) delivery platforms. OpenSignal apparently just lumps them all into their national sample with equal weight. (You can read about the research company's methodology in the report.)
More telling is the relationship between Comcast’s Xfinity brand and Charter’s Spectrum Internet services versus T-Mobile, which only offers one home broadband flavor — FWA. Both cable broadband providers offer significantly faster home broadband connections, on both the downstream and upstream side, compared to T-Mobile 5G Home Internet.
The same was true for both the quality of internet connection and, more specifically to streaming consumers, the quality of video connection.
