T-Mobile Will Eventually Need Fiber Network: New Street
Reports T-Mobile is seeking partners for a fiber joint venture aren’t new or surprising, but doing so likely makes long-term strategic sense for the carrier, New Street’s Jonathan Chaplin told investors Tuesday. Reports suggest T-Mobile could invest up to $4…
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billion in the venture, he said. Last year, T-Mobile quietly launched a “very limited” fiber internet pilot in New York City to supplement fixed wireless coverage (see 2108110056), covering buildings in Manhattan. “We have argued for some time that in the long-run T-Mobile (and others) will need a terrestrial network,” Chaplin said. “First, the product market for fixed and mobile is converging. T-Mobile is accelerating the convergence with the tremendous success they have had with FWB [fixed wireless broadband]. FWB is capacity limited, and so they will need terrestrial broadband offering at some point,” he said. “Second, the industry will burn through spectrum below 6 GHz over the next 5-10 years and will need to start using millimeter wave spectrum. Deploying this spectrum without a terrestrial network will be extremely costly, leaving T-Mobile at a disadvantage to carriers with a terrestrial network.”