Cable Companies and Mobile Carriers Battle Over Fixed Wireless Internet

Consumers increasingly are ditching traditional broadband plans for more-affordable 5G fixed-wireless internet service. In response, cable companies say they may be losing some battles, but in the end they’ll win the war—and that customers who have switched will return. Since 2018, wireless carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile US have used the excess capacity on their fifth-generation cellular networks to lure broadband-internet subscribers away with 5G fixed-wireless plans that in some cases can cost half of what a cable plan does. As cable companies bleed subscribers to fixed wireless, they’ve harped on the cheaper service’s shortcomings in public rhetoric and TV commercials, in a phone-versus-cable tit-for-tat. With fixed-wireless plans, a subscriber uses an in-home receiver to pick up signals from a cell tower. A number of factors can hurt the web speeds, including network congestion, the receiver’s distance from the cell tower and obstacles such as trees between the receiver and the tower. Both T-Mobile and Verizon acknowledge these limitations on their websites.