- T-Mobile said yesterday it has more than 1 million customers on a waiting list to get fixed wireless
- Its deals to acquire Lumos and Metronet will not only add more customers, but will allow some of these FWA wait-list customers to choose fiber instead
- T-Mobile’s CEO Mike Sievert said the company is not looking at any other fiber JVs
Across the U.S., T-Mobile has over 1 million customers on a waiting list for its 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) home broadband, said T-Mobile’s President of Marketing, Strategy and Products Mike Katz at the company’s Capital Markets Day in San Francisco yesterday.
T-Mobile hasn’t yet been able to serve these customers because it doesn’t have enough excess fallow capacity on its 5G mobile network. That’s a big impetus for T-Mobile’s move into fiber.
Of course, T-Mobile is in the process of acquiring two fiber companies: Lumos and Metronet through joint ventures with investment companies.
Yesterday, Katz bragged about T-Mobile’s FWA business, saying: “Our 5G broadband business has grown to be the fifth largest ISP in America. We’ve been the fastest growing broadband provider every single quarter since we launched three-and-a-half years ago. We now serve over 5.6 million customers.”
T-Mobile’s problem is a good one to have. There’s more demand for its FWA product than there is supply. That’s because T-Mobile’s FWA taps fallow capacity on the company’s mobile network. And it’s very careful not to overtax the mobile network with too many FWA customers.
Obviously, when T-Mobile is able to offer a fiber product, it will get more customers. But as a side benefit, when an existing FWA customer upgrades to T-Mobile fiber, that will also open up a new incremental slot for an additional FWA 5G customer.
“One of the things that gives us a real advantage as we move into fiber is the fact that we have customers today that have tried to buy 5G broadband from us and we haven’t been able to support them because of our fallow capacity problem. We think there’s immediate opportunity for us to take that demand and convert into paying fiber customers. We also think these are really synergistic products,” Katz said.
Lumos and Metronet
In terms of the acquisitions of Lumos and Metronet, Katz said they are “pure-play” fiber providers, meaning they’re not converting existing copper assets to fiber. But rather, they are building greenfield fiber networks.
“They have been tremendously successful as standalone companies both building fiber but also penetrating their fiber footprints, each with fiber penetrations of 35% or better,” Katz said.
Lumos and Metronet will both operate as open-access fiber providers, where T-Mobile will be the anchor tenant on the networks, but other ISPs will be invited to wholesale the networks as well. In addition to these two JVs, T-Mobile is working with other open-access fiber providers and currently offers T-Fiber in several markets.
In the question-and-answer portion of its Capital Markets Day, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said the JV deals for Lumos and Metronet will allow T-Mobile to pass 12-15 million homes with fiber, and the JV’s will be run by people who are already experts in fiber broadband. “It allows us to build T-Fiber as a brand across each one of those transactions,” said Sievert.
Of course, analysts wanted to know if T-Mobile is eyeing any other fiber JVs. Sievert said that over the last couple of years, “we have met just about everybody and taken a hard look at options." He emphasized that T-Mobile is not working on any other acquisitions at this time. “These transactions are the transactions,” he said. “They’re both amazing opportunities.”
T-Mobile’s big marketing machine
Executives went on to brag about T-Mobile’s marketing chops that will make it easy to start selling fiber. Katz said T-Mobile’s traditional core wireless business serves 126 million customers, and the company has a well-known brand and does both physical and digital retail.
“We have a scaled, national go-to-market set of capabilities that we’ve already built right now to support fixed wireless,” said Katz. “We are leveraging that in our fiber deployments.”