PHOENIX––In a dimmed conference hall, all participants seated safely spaced, a regional carrier audience listened to T-Mobile US’ Dow Draper tell them about the network operator’s massive plans to expand into rural markets with 5G for mobile and home internet service.
T-Mobile US has been a CCA member for nearly a decade, and Draper, EVP of T-Mobile US’ new emerging products group, thanked CCA for its contributions on policy matters and its regional carrier roaming partners as part of his speech. In some ways, T-Mobile US is still competing against AT&T and Verizon, just as the other CCA members are. But T-Mobile US no longer comes from the position of being a scrappy upstart, or the fourth-largest national carrier. It’s now the second-largest operator in the U.S., and is leveraging its acquisition of Sprint to set its sights on smaller and rural markets as part of its expansion. On the company’s most recent quarterly call, T-Mo executives spoke about expanding their retail engagement in rural communities and said that nearly one-third of its new postpaid account activations during the second quarter came from smaller markets and rural areas, up from about a quarter of activations in 2020. Jon Freier, EVP of T-Mo’s consumer group, called small and rural markets “a huge opportunity” for the carrier and noted that the company is “well on-pace” to open 200 retail stores this year along with hiring 1,000 “mobile hometown experts,” who will be available in cities and towns where T-Mo doesn’t have a retail presence. The carrier expects to build up to 2,500 of those hometown experts.
Both Sprint and T-Mobile US had low penetration in rural markets, pre-merger, Draper tells CCA. But now, the new T-Mobile US has an opportunity to change that — has, in fact, committed to the FCC that it will build out 5G in rural markets over the next few years, providing 99% of Americans with access to speeds of at least 50 Mbps and 90% of the U.S. population with speeds of at least 100 Mbps. T-Mobile US is making a $40 billion, multi-year investment, Draper tells the CCA audience, which will result in a “network the likes of which this country has never seen. … We are driving super hard to realize this opportunity.”
T-Mobile US will bring broadband choice to rural markets, he said, framing cable operators as the bad guys who have stifled broadband competition. The new 5G network, based on T-Mobile US’ “layer cake” spectrum strategy, is allowing the carrier to expand on its wireless offerings with new services––like its Fixed Wireless Access home broadband. Draper, as head of the emerging products group, said that he joined T-Mobile US in large part because he could guide the exploration of new and innovative services like Fixed Wireless Access that would take advantage of the massive amount of capacity that the carrier’s network will have, rather than working out yet another smartphone offer that squeezed out another few dollars in revenue. The same morning that Draper addressed CCA, T-Mobile US announced that its T-Mobile Home Internet had just been expanded into 51 cities and towns in Florida, Georgia and North and South Carolina, ranging from places like Jacksonville and Tallahassee, Florida to Asheville and Mount Airy (pop. 10,388), NC. The mobile network operator is now laying claim to being “one of the largest broadband providers in the U.S. by service area — with more than 30 million households eligible for T-Mobile Home Internet nationwide.”
“We’re expanding access in places that have never had a real choice when it comes to home broadband, where people are fed up with cable and telco ISPs,” said Draper, in a statement accompanying that announcement––although he didn’t use quite those same words at CCA. In the same release, T-Mobile US turned its strategy of aggressively calling out its competitors––usually directed at AT&T and Verizon––on wired broadband providers in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. “The traditional landline ISPs have failed the south,” the carrier declared. “Across these four states, nearly 1 million people do not have access to a single wired internet provider. That bears repeating — nearly 1 million people across just four states do not have access at all. This is unacceptable. And unfortunately, that’s not all. Landline ISPs have left nearly 1.7 million people without any access to speeds above 25 Mbps and nearly 3.3 million people with access to only one provider.”
At CCA, though, Draper emphasized the overall size of the broadband market and the amount of money flowing into broadband expansion. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical nature of connectivity and bridging the digital divide has become more urgent than ever (as other CCA carriers also attested, in a panel earlier that morning). The challenge that the industry faces, Draper said, is in actually closing the broadband gaps that exist in every market across the country––and T-Mo thinks that FWA is a faster and more cost-effective way of doing so than running fiber to every home. The carrier’s wireless broadband is “not right for everyone,” he acknowledged, “but for the vast majority of broadband use cases, we have the speed and capacity to satisfy their demands and make them very happy.” T-Mobile US started off with 100,000 pilot customers and wanted to reach 500,000 home internet customers by the end of this year; it’s on track to do so, Draper said. And because the service rides on the back of T-Mo’s mobile network, when it upgrades a cell site, Draper says that it has the capacity immediately to offer T-Mobile Home Internet and is able to “expand and offer internet in miles, not in meters.”
The goal, as Draper describes it, is to provide a cost-effective and efficient technology deployment that provides a new service option that meets subscriber needs in rural, urban and suburban markets. “We think we’ve done this by stepping up and investing in our 5G network,” he said, closing his remarks by telling the audience that they should expect to see more expansion from T-Mobile in the future.
