AT&T testing wireless broadband network tech to serve rural areas at speeds of 15-25 Mbps
Mike Dano / FierceWireless :
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015, AT&T was probing whether fixed wireless could reach rural homes at usable speeds — the 15-25 Mbps trials reported by Mike Dano were an early test of skipping wired builds entirely. The years that followed show how that bet evolved: AT&T next pitched multi-gigabit internet over shaped radio guided by power lines, then ran Georgia trials on that approach in late 2017 while admitting it had no timeline for commercial deployment.
First-order effects
- Rural households are the direct audience: the trial targets speeds of 15-25 Mbps where wired broadband economics have historically failed to justify plant investment.
Second-order effects
- Each experimental delivery mechanism spawned a follow-on program — the wireless tests fed into the Georgia power-line trials, keeping AT&T's rural engineering pipeline active even as commercial dates slipped away.
Third-order effects
- By 2022 AT&T was celebrating first-in-world 20 Gbps speeds over production fiber, suggesting the pattern: rural wireless and power-line schemes stayed perpetually in trial while capital and marketing consolidated behind fiber as the scalable answer.
The trend: Carriers keep cycling experimental rural delivery technologies through field trials — wireless, then power lines — but their long-term infrastructure commitments settle on fiber, leaving true rural coverage gaps to joint efforts like the later AT&T-T-Mobile-Verizon dead-zone venture.