The GFiber team recently broke ground for fiber-internet service that aims to cover unincorporated Douglas County (CO). “We try to put our infrastructure within the entire community and then we let people know that, hey, you’re eligible for Google Fiber service,” said Alberto Garcia, GFiber’s government and community affairs manager. “Our plan is to cover as many homes as possible.” GFiber is planning to expand in several more Denver-area communities, but also in other cities and towns around the state that want to work with the company. And that’s without public funding like the Broadband, Access, Equity and Deployment program, a $42.5 billion plan to use federal money to invest in broadband infrastructure in neglected parts of the U.S. “We believe we have the resources to have deployment to a number of areas,” Garcia said. “BEAD funding may be more applicable to some of the smaller providers who can go out and say, with this money, with this resource, we can go to these other communities.”

You probably haven’t noticed, but the press is no longer full of articles claiming that Fixed Wireless Access cellular broadband is a poor broadband choice for customers. For several years, there was a constant stream of quotes by executives of big cable companies and telcos saying that FWA was a flash in the pan that was only selling quickly because of low prices. They said that FWA performance was erratic, and cellular carriers didn’t have enough excess capacity to provide a reliable broadband connection. There were many predictions made that FWA would plateau as word of mouth spread that FWA's performance was substandard. But that plateau hasn’t happened. The recent quarterly growth of FWA has held steady for each of the three major FWA providers. Verizon recently said it has a goal of reaching 8-9 million FWA customers by 2030. T-Mobile has a more aggressive plan to reach 12 million customers by the end of 2028. The industry segment is far from running out of gas.