Rural Precision Playbook is T-Mobile’s Fixed Wireless Secret Sauce

T-Mobile has a secret sauce for selling T-Mobile Home fixed wireless service in rural areas that involves a granular competitive analysis of 775 sub-markets, said CEO Mike Sievert. The company is seeing strong growth for the fixed wireless offering, having reached 1 million subscribers in less than a year. And the product is particularly strong in what the company calls “rural and small” markets that T-Mobile identifies as 40 percent of the US population. The rural and small market segment, in turn, is comprised of the 775 sub-markets and for each sub-market, “we study our relative competition,” said Sievert. “Where is our network? Is it everywhere we need?” This analysis informs the playbook on how to grow penetration in these markets. Based on this analysis, he said, “we believe we’re competitive across about 30 percent of POPs represented by [these rural and small markets].” “POPs” is a wireless industry term meaning essentially wireless covered population. Each sub-segment is assigned to a different level of competitiveness – and Sievert referred to the markets where they are competitive (currently the 30 percent benchmark) as “right to win” markets.