Dan Jones

Hurricane Beryl, the first hurricane of the 2024 season to hit the U.S, spiraled 80 mile per hour winds through Houston, Texas, and is now heading northeast and beyond. More than 2 million people in Texas are without power. There are reports of outages on the AT&T and Verizon cellular networks in Texas in the wake of storm, as well as disruptions to Internet service providers such as Xfinity. Here’s what’s going on with the big three mobile operators:

AT&T’s CEO highlighted the operator's progress of combining 5G, fiber and other forthcoming elements like direct-to-satellite communications. “Converged is now the opportunity” CEO John Stankey stated. “That’s going to be one of the key areas for us to get to 40 or 50% [market penetration rates],” he added. This convergence includes fiber, as it was noted that AT&T is on track to reach its goal of 30 million fiber locations passed by the end of 2025. The converged landscape also includes 5G.

The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, is supposed to promote investment in chip manufacturing plants, help ease supply chain woes and bring skilled manufacturing jobs back to the United States. 5G wireless chips will be part of that wider picture. Doug Kirkpatrick, former chief scientist at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said, “There has been a general concern that the United States is falling behind in terms of chip production and technology.

Consumer fixed wireless (FWA) access growth using 5G networks has been one of the bright spots of the move to the new cellular standard. Both T-Mobile and Verizon in the United States have seen success offering the latest wireless technology to replace cable internet for the public stateside and it is spreading across the world. The reason?