AT&T testing wireless broadband network tech to serve rural areas at speeds of 15-25 Mbps
Mike Dano / FierceWireless :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 field test sits early in AT&T's long search for a cheaper last mile than trenching fiber into sparsely populated areas: 15-25 Mbps over wireless was pitched as enough for rural households that incumbent wired buildouts had skipped.
The trial kicked off a string of experiments in the same vein — AT&T's later plan for multi-gigabit service over shaped radio guided by power lines, the Georgia power-line trials that ended without a commercial timeline, and even drone-based LTE tests for uncovered areas — all probing whether non-traditional links could close rural coverage gaps.
First-order effects
- Rural households gain a candidate alternative to waiting on wired builds, with AT&T targeting usable-but-modest 15-25 Mbps speeds via wireless rather than fiber.
- For AT&T, the immediate payoff is cost data: wireless backhaul-to-the-home avoids per-mile trenching, making thin-density areas economically servable where fiber is not.
Second-order effects
- If rural fixed wireless pencils out, it pressures competing carriers' rural economics too — a pressure that resurfaces years later in the reported agreement among AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to form a joint venture aimed at ending US wireless dead zones.
- Each trial feeds the next: the 2015 wireless work established the measurement playbook AT&T reused for its power-line radio trials, letting it compare delivery technologies against a common rural-use benchmark.
Third-order effects
- Taken together with AT&T's eventual push to a production 20 Gbps fiber network, the pattern shows a two-track structure emerging: fiber as the premium urban/suburban product, wireless experiments as the rural stopgap — with carriers sequencing technologies by population density.
- If carrier-run fixed wireless matures, regulators and rural programs face a structural question of whether subsidized fiber builds remain necessary or whether commercial wireless coverage makes universal wired deployment redundant.
The trend: US carriers are running parallel experiments in wireless and hybrid delivery technologies for rural broadband, using them to price out where fiber deployment stops making sense.