Carrier says it has expanded service in three Midwestern states
T-Mobile US continues its expansion of access to the Home Internet service that utilizes its 5G network, saying this week that it has extended availability of the service in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The carrier said that it now covers more than 6 million homes in those three states and more than 40 million homes nationwide are eligible for its broadband internet service. In Michigan, T-Mo cited numbers that 1.2 million residents don’t have a fixed broadband connection, and 1.3 million people in Wisconsin either don’t have or can’t afford home broadband services.
The carrier offers its T-Mobile 5G Home Internet for $50 a month with automatic payments, and sweetens the deal for customers who have its Magenta Max family phone plan by knocking $20 off the monthly cost of Home Internet.
The expansion of the Home Internet Service comes amid news this week that T-Mobile US is looking into the possibility of building a fiber network, either as part of a joint venture or a commercial partnership, according to reporting by Bloomberg.
Unlike its major telco and cable competitors, T-Mobile US has been a pureplay wireless network operator, depending on leasing fiber capacity to support its wireless network backhaul needs. It has been able to offer the Home Internet service on its mobile network due to the enormous amount of capacity that it has been able to build out since acquiring Sprint and its midband spectrum holdings. T-Mobile US’ network includes an ever-growing percentage of Fixed Wireless Access home broadband subscribers; the company added 578,000 net new home internet subscribers in the third quarter for a total internet customer base of about 2.1 million. T-Mobile US has said that it anticipates a customer base of between 7-8 million FWA subscribers by the end of 2025.
Those FWA customers are data-hungry (a recent estimate from BCG says that FWA customers use between 20-40 times more data than a mobile customer), but represent lower revenue-per-bit than the premium paid by mobile users.
Bloomberg reported that T-Mobile US was considering getting into a fiber network by chipping in on either a joint venture or a commercial partnership worth up to $4 billion, and that it is working with Citigroup to find partners.
