Supporting Rural Cell Towers

I work with a lot of internet service providers that own rural fiber. Some owners have been successful in providing fiber to the cell sites located near their networks.  A few sell directly to a cellular carrier, but most of these connections are sold to an intermediate carrier that bundles together cellular connections across a large geographic area. This has been good business, but now I’m hearing about requests from cellular companies or intermediate carriers to increase bandwidth at cell sites. This makes sense; bandwidth usage on cellphones is growing at an even faster pace than bandwidth use for households. There is another phenomenon driving the recent need for more bandwidth at cell sites. T-Mobile and Verizon have added almost 7 million fixed wireless access cellular broadband customers in just the last few years and have gained over a 6% market share of all national broadband connections. These new requests for higher bandwidth create a few issues for local providers, but the real dilemma is that increasing bandwidth for a fixed wireless access site is enabling a last-mile competitor.