Home Broadband Is 5G’s Surprise Killer App

But the surprise plot twist came when replacing home cable internet turned into 5G’s most widely adopted new application.Fixed wireless access (FWA) now serves over 14 million U.S. customers, and contributes 28 percent of worldwide wireless traffic. Fixed wireless access is what the term sounds like: broadband internet delivered over a cellular radio link to a stationary location—no cable, no fiber, no trenching, no satellite broadband antenna pointed at the sky. What makes FWA distinctive is that it repurposes the same towers, spectrum, and 5G infrastructure that was built for mobile devices.One U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner has called FWA 5G’s killer app. And that’s true not just in the United States either. Jio, India’s largest carrier, is also one of the world’s largest FWA providers, with over 9 million customers as of last year.Carriers discovered they could repurpose surplus 5G capacity, while also exploiting a usage pattern quirk: mobile traffic starts to drop after 8 p.m., just when home internet usage peaks. The result is broadband, delivered via traditional cellphone towers, at a lower cost than fiber deployment. For these reasons FWA provides real price competition to cable broadband, while reaching underserved rural and suburban communities.Fixed Wireless Access Repurposes Ambitious 5G InfrastructureFWA is cheaper to deploy than fiber, and for most homes and small businesses, fiber’s gigabit speeds are overkill anyway. And since FWA uses the same wireless networks built for cellular service, FWA works anywhere that receives a steady cellular signal.As cellular networks extend into rural and underserved areas, FWA’s coverage map expands with them. In these remote locales, the other main viable broadband alternative typically comes from satellite se