AT&T has been cautious in its approach to a consumer-focused fixed-wireless access (FWA) service but is set to launch an enterprise-focused FWA service that could better meet its operational goals.

AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches told attendees at Deutsche Bank's Annual Media, Internet and Telecom Conference this week that the carrier sees FWA as an area of growth for the carrier’s enterprise offerings.

“As you think about business wireline, the growth vectors there will be fixed wireless, principally focused on small, medium-sized businesses,” Desroches said. “I think we have an opportunity to do much better than we have there.”

Toward that goal, Desroches said the carrier is “going to introduce a business product, a new iteration of a business product,” which will continue to adhere to AT&T’s FWA goal of managing network resources.

The executive noted the new product will be targeted at “small-to-medium sized businesses that don’t have the significant bandwidth consumption.” This is due to AT&T’s math that shows a higher cost of providing broadband services via a wireless connection versus a wired connection.

“We understand the cost to serve bandwidth on a mobile network is much more expensive than a fixed network,” Desroches said. “And if you are a high-consumption user … you're selling a product at a discount to fix and it's going to cost you more to serve that product. … We never thought the economics were attractive long term to use it as a solution for consumers on a broad-scale basis, and our views on that haven't changed. While it may feel good today to those that are really leaning in, over time the cost to continue to add capacity to the network will make many of them rethink the offering.”

This cautious approach has played out in AT&T’s current Internet Air consumer FWA product. The carrier added around 68,000 new FWA connections during the fourth quarter of last year, pushing its total Internet Air customer base to 93,000 total connections.

AT&T rivals T-Mobile US and Verizon, which have both been offering their respective FWA services for several years, each added around 500,000 new FWA customers during the fourth quarter. T-Mobile ended the year with 4.8 million 5G-powered FWA connections, while Verizon counted 3 million FWA connections.

Despite Desroches' proclamation, those carriers remain confident in their decisions to expand their FWA offerings.

Michael Katz, president of marketing, strategy and products at T-Mobile, told attendees at a recent Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference that the carrier is very detailed in how it manages the impact FWA has on its network.

“I think that's one of the things that you've heard us consistently talk about with this business — that it is an excess-capacity model,” Katz said. “We've been very specific from the beginning on exactly where we will sell it. And when I say where we'll sell, I mean literally down to the household.”

“And we've built models that are dynamic,” he added. “They update in real time that tell us exactly where we can put this, where we can be confident that with any projected forward usage both of mobile or FWA users plus network advancements that we're going to make exactly where in the network we can have FWA customers.”

AT&T’s enterprise-focused FWA push will join similar efforts from those same rivals.

Verizon CFO Tony Skiadas told attendees at an investor conference late last year that the carrier’s business unit accounted for more than one-third of the carrier’s robust FWA connection growth.

“Kyle and the team are doing a steady [100,000], 135,000 fixed-wireless adds and those are both on LTE and 5G,” Skiadas said. “It resonates with customers. It’s very simple for businesses as well. You don’t have to run wires, so customers liked the product. They like the security and the reliability of the Verizon network and that’s something that’s very important for business customers.”

T-Mobile is taking a similar approach. Mishka Dehgan, SVP for strategy, product and solutions engineering at T-Mobile’s Business Group, told SDxCentral during an interview at the MWC Las Vegas event that the carrier is seeing enterprise FWA growth opportunities, highlighting a specific business need.

“Usually what you see with fixed wireless is a nationwide, distributed footprint that the customer wants to light up,” Dehgan said.

AT&T recently extended the reach of its Internet Air FWA product to 26 new markets, nearly doubling its market footprint to a total of 59 locations. The new markets include a number of larger metro areas like San Diego, California; San Antonio and Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Indianapolis; Oklahoma City; and Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina.

Analyst firm Mobile Experts recently reported there were now more than 100 mobile operators offering some form of 5G-based FWA service, compared to around 60 just two years ago. The research firm also reported that FWA connections surpassed more than 100 million at the end of last year, with that number set to hit 257 million connections by 2028.