Fixed-wireless access (FWA) services continue to attract users, backed by increased availability from telecom operators looking to squeeze more revenues from their network resources, momentum that Dell’Oro Group predicts will lead to more than 190 million FWA-based connections worldwide before the end of the decade.

Dell’Oro Group predicts that global FWA connections will surpass 191 million by 2029, with 5G-based services using sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum “will dominate the global residential CPE market.” This growth is being driven by “ease of deployment along with the more widespread availability of 4G LTE and 5G sub-6 GHz networks.”

The research firm added that the sale of FWA-supporting equipment was “on track to advance 10% in 2025.” This includes the sale of radio access network (RAN) equipment, residential equipment, and enterprise routers and gateways.

The report noted that this increase was coming “as mobile operators continue to expand the availability of FWA services in more markets in order to steal away more disaffected DSL and cable broadband subscribers.”

Verizon Business, for instance, recently launched an enterprise-focused FWA service using 5G network slicing technology, which allows for more consistent service performance and support service-level agreements (SLAs). The new service is designed to provide consistent throughput and latency, with noted speeds of at least 200 Mb/s on the downlink and 45 Mb/s for the uplink.

Scott Lawrence, chief product officer at Verizon Business, positioned the new offering as a way to better support uplink-heavy traffic like uploading content into a cloud environment or AI systems.

“As businesses take on AI-centric workloads (e.g., inferencing at the edge), they are now uploading more data than ever before,” Lawrence explained. “They’re capturing huge amounts of data from their operating environments (central or remote), uploading it into their systems, and transferring it into cloud instances and software platforms for AI-driven insights and generative actions.”

T-Mobile US is also continuing to see robust uptake, with the operator currently serving more than eight million FWA customers. More significantly, those FWA customers were consuming an average of 580 gigabytes (GB) per month of data through that service, which is a significant increase from the approximately 450 GB of month they were averaging two years ago.

This is also starting to pay off.

A Rethink Technology Research report from 2024 noted that U.S.-based FWA services were generating around $58 per month in revenue per connection, with enterprise opportunities set to drive further penetration.

“For the larger operators, which are in the business of providing commercial and enterprise services, FWA could be used as a great upselling tool,” the research firm wrote. “For business premises in underserved locations, FWA opens the door for upselling various additional software and networking services. For those using wireless as a failover connection, a robust FWA service could help displace the ISP providing the primary connection. For business with lots of locations, FWA could help reduce the connectivity charges they face, and provide a clear motivation from this total cost of ownership perspective.”

U.S. leading the way, but international is growing

Dell’Oro Group VP Jeff Heynen explained that U.S. operators continue to lead this deployment charge, with mobile operators in India, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East “taking a page from the U.S. operators’ book and are quickly expanding their own FWA offerings, especially with the imminent threat of Starlink, Amazon, OneWeb, and other [low-Earth orbit] satellite broadband providers.”

That last point was touched on by AT&T CEO John Stankey, who recently downplayed that satellite-based competitive concern. Stankey specifically pointed to limitations with “upstream bandwidth,” which “becomes more important in the AI dynamic.”

“It’s inherently going to be a more fragile upstream uplink than what you're going to get in a terrestrial network that gets on fiber really quickly,” Stankey said of a satellite upstream connection. “The faster you can get something on fiber, the more robust that upstream uplink is going to be, and the more low-band spectrum you have to do that, the more robust that upstream link is going to be. Satellite doesn't have those things.”

Stankey built on that spectrum notion by stating AT&T and its direct rivals T-Mobile US and Verizon each have access to approximately 300 megahertz of spectrum that can be transmitted from each cell site, which is more than triple the amount of spectrum the newly spectrum-filled SpaceX can provide from its satellite constellation.

“If you think about it, you get 80 megahertz you get to put on a spot beam that has a radius that is dramatically larger than a cell site – you know, two-and-a-half miles, two miles for a cell site, you're talking about a spot beam right now that's probably close to 20 miles, and you're taking 80 megahertz and you're putting over that period, you have a weaker uplink. That's a hard putt to be a like-to-like replacement,” Stankey said.

However, it should be noted that AT&T has also recently touted its own satellite-based broadband plans that it expects to launch by mid-year.

Dell’Oro Group’s FWA predictions align somewhat with a separate forecast last year by Omdia, which expects global 5G-based FWA connections to surpass 150 million connections by 2030.