Fortified with additional spectrum from EchoStar, AT&T is battling Comcast and other internet providers in Houston with its fixed wireless access (FWA) service.
Like Verizon and T-Mobile, AT&T is now putting more emphasis onto its FWA business. As part of that effort, AT&T agreed in August to purchase $23 billion worth of spectrum from EchoStar, including an average of 30 MHz of nationwide 3.45 GHz midband spectrum.
And AT&T can activate that spectrum relatively quickly – the operator can add EchoStar’s spectrum into its network through a software upgrade to its existing 5G equipment.
AT&T’s FWA strategy is crystalizing in Houston, Texas, where AT&T also operates an extensive fiber network. AT&T’s efforts there may pose a competitive threat to other fixed internet operators in the Houston market, including Xfinity provider Comcast, Ezee Fiber, and others.
Key takeaways:
- Houston is a prime battleground for cable, fiber, and FWA. According to Ookla Speedtest Intelligence® data, AT&T’s median FWA download speed in Houston was 106.40 Mbps in September 2025, and its median upload speed during that period was 7.41 Mbps. That’s slower than the fiber offerings from AT&T and the cable offerings from Comcast in the city.
- AT&T’s midband spectrum holdings (C-band and 3.45 GHz) in Houston stand to grow from 120 MHz to 150 MHz, a 25% increase, thanks to the addition of EchoStar’s 3.45 GHz spectrum licenses. More spectrum typically results in additional network capacity and faster speeds.
- AT&T is using FWA to expand beyond the reaches of its fiber network in Houston, thereby competing with other fixed internet providers in Houston suburbs like Conroe and League City.
AT&T has reignited its FWA business
AT&T is no stranger to FWA. In 2015, AT&T agreed to offer internet connections in 1.1 million rural locations across 18 states as part of the U.S. government’s CAF II program. AT&T used 4G LTE-based FWA to reach some of those locations, offering speeds of at least 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up (which met the FCC’s broadband benchmarks at that time).
More recently, AT&T has re-engaged with FWA in a significant way via its 5G network. The company launched its 5G-powered Internet Air FWA product in August 2023, and has seen significant customer growth since.
However, AT&T has not pursued the FWA market as aggressively as its rivals. AT&T in the second quarter of 2025 passed the 1 million FWA customer milestone, while T-Mobile counted around 7.3 million FWA customers and Verizon said it had around 5.1 million FWA customers. Importantly, FWA speeds across all three providers have been increasing, according to Ookla findings.
Collectively, the FWA services from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have had a major impact on cable operators in the U.S. T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T added a combined 3.7 million FWA customers during 2024, while the nation’s top cable companies collectively lost roughly 1 million broadband subscribers.
AT&T officials have said the operator plans to use FWA in three situations:
- Outside of AT&T’s fiber footprint, thereby extending the reach of its converged fixed wireless / smartphone service.
- Inside its legacy copper network footprint. AT&T is working to decommission its copper network, and it will offer fixed wireless services to customers who will not receive a fiber alternative.
- In its planned fiber footprint. AT&T currently covers around 30 million U.S. locations with fiber, but it hopes to expand that to a total of 60 million locations by the end of 2030. The company plans to use FWA as an interim anchor while it builds fiber to those remaining locations.
That overall strategy aligns with AT&T’s efforts to sign up customers to multiple services – those customers are the most valuable, according to AT&T, in that they have the lowest churn profiles and highest lifetime values. In the third quarter of 2025, AT&T said that more than 41% of its fiber customers also subscribed to its mobile service, and more than half of its Internet Air FWA subscribers also subscribed to AT&T’s mobile service.
Houston is an FWA battleground
Sunit Patel, the CFO of U.S. cell tower operator Crown Castle, described Houston as an ideal location for fixed wireless services, particularly at the boundary between suburban and rural areas. “That’s usually … a good area where fixed wireless will work well,” he said at a recent investor conference.
Houston is also one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., making it a prime market for internet service providers on the hunt for more customers. According to Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, the Houston metro area added over 1.5 million new residents between 2010 and 2023, second only to the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area in terms of overall growth. During that same time period, the Chicago metro area lost about 210,000 residents, Los Angeles’ population dipped by about 40,000 people, and the New York metro area added about 580,000 residents.
According to Speedtest Intelligence, AT&T’s FWA median download speeds trail those of fiber and cable providers in Houston. AT&T Internet Air median download speeds reached 106.40 Mbps in September, while its median upload speeds hit 7.42 Mbps. Meanwhile, Comcast’s median cable download speeds in Houston clocked in at 292.81 Mbps and its median upload speeds were 41.49 Mbps in September (Comcast has been working to improve its upload speeds in Houston and elsewhere, according to recent Ookla findings). AT&T’s median fiber download speeds in the city were 366.56 Mbps and its median upload speeds were 306.90 Mbps. And Ezee Fiber’s median download speeds reached 545.39 Mbps and its median upload speeds were 464.46 Mbps. It’s worth noting that many internet service providers offer different tiers of service, with faster plans available at a higher price.
According to Speedtest Insights®, AT&T’s fixed wireless business is spread throughout the greater Houston metro area:
This is likely due to the inherent limits of FWA on a 5G network. FWA is deployed in areas with excess 5G network capacity to prevent overloading. Dense accumulations of FWA customers might overload portions of that 5G network, affecting both FWA and smartphone customers.
This is much different from a fiber network design, which typically has plenty of capacity. As a result, fiber operators tend to load as many customers as possible onto their networks, regardless of user density. The more, the better. After all, each foot of an underground fiber network costs a median of $18.25 to build, according to the Fiber Broadband Association.
AT&T’s deployment of FWA on the fringes of its fiber network can be seen in Houston suburbs like Conroe and League City, according to Speedtest Insights. These are cities where AT&T’s fiber network does not fully reach – but where it is offering FWA connections. They are also locations where other providers – including Comcast, Ezee Fiber, and others – currently offer internet connections.
AT&T can leverage EchoStar’s spectrum to expand its FWA business
Although 5G operators can use any spectrum band for FWA, midband spectrum like 3.45 GHz (used by AT&T), C-band (used by AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile), and 2.5 GHz (used by T-Mobile) form the backbone of today’s 5G-powered FWA services in the U.S. Such spectrum is considered appropriate for covering wide geographic areas as well as providing speedy, high-capacity connections.
AT&T has been slowly growing its midband spectrum holdings. The operator spent around $23.4 billion in the FCC’s C-band auction in 2021. A year later, the operator bought $9 billion worth of 3.45 GHz spectrum in another FCC auction.
Now, AT&T plans to acquire more midband 3.45 GHz spectrum – and 20 MHz of lowband 600 MHz spectrum – from EchoStar, in a deal that still requires regulatory approval. AT&T currently doesn’t use 600 MHz spectrum in its network, which means the company will need to install new hardware on its cell towers in order to deploy that spectrum.
However, AT&T will be able to quickly add EchoStar’s 3.45 GHz spectrum to its existing network via a software upgrade. Meaning, AT&T won’t need to update each of its cell towers with new hardware – an expensive and time-consuming process – in order to put EchoStar’s 3.45 GHz spectrum licenses into use. AT&T officials said that, via a spectrum-leasing agreement with EchoStar, AT&T can add EchoStar’s midband spectrum to AT&T cell sites covering nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population by mid-November 2025.
Since network speeds and capacity are directly related to the amount of spectrum an operator has, the financial analysts at New Street Research estimate that EchoStar’s spectrum will allow AT&T’s network to support an additional 900,000 consumer FWA subscribers on a nationwide basis.
In Houston, AT&T stands to gain 30 MHz worth of EchoStar’s 3.45 GHz spectrum licenses, according to Spectrum Omega. That spectrum would be added to the 80 MHz of C-band and 40 MHz of 3.45 GHz spectrum that AT&T already owns in the market, giving it a total of 150 MHz of midband spectrum in Houston.
According to recent Ookla RootMetrics® drive test data from Houston, AT&T has been leaning heavily on its C-band and 3.45 GHz holdings to supply 5G connections to its smartphone customers in Houston.
Spectrum “depth” is another way to measure AT&T’s spectrum usage. The amount of spectrum in use in an operator’s network often directly relates to the speeds that operator can provide. AT&T used 120 MHz of midband spectrum (C-band and 3.45 GHz, via two-carrier aggregation) in 37.3% of RootMetrics’ tests in Houston in the second half of 2025. The operator used 80 MHz of midband spectrum (C-band) in another 46% of tests. This indicates that AT&T still has some additional spectrum to put into action inside its network for its smartphone and FWA customers.
Fiber, cable and FWA can be applied to the digital divide
A final element in a review of the greater Houston area involves the locations that are still not yet covered by the likes of AT&T, Comcast and others. For decades, various U.S. government programs have sought to bridge this digital divide in Texas and elsewhere.
For example, AT&T’s participation in the FCC’s CAF II program included almost 180,000 locations in rural parts of Texas. Similarly, Charter Communications pledged to cover a wide swath of East Texas via the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) rural broadband program.
Today, the Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) rates most of the counties immediately in and around Houston as 90-100% served by broadband. But counties that are further afield rank lower. For example, Liberty County (just east of Conroe) is listed as 66.4% served by broadband. The FCC’s broadband benchmark was changed to 100 Mbps downloads and 20 Mbps uploads in 2024.
The U.S. government’s newest broadband funding program, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD), was recently reworked to put more focus on technologies like fixed wireless and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. That’s because those technologies are often cheaper and faster to deploy than fiber.
Texas’ BEAD funding map highlights areas around Houston that the state aims to cover with broadband. The state recently allocated around half of its $1.3 billion in BEAD grants to fiber providers, with the remainder split relatively evenly between fixed wireless and satellite providers. AT&T received $32 million in grants to cover 6,651 locations in Texas with fiber. Comcast didn’t receive any BEAD grants for Texas.
On a nationwide basis, AT&T has so far received $718.8 million in BEAD grants to cover 141,900 rural locations with broadband. AT&T intends to use fiber to meet those obligations. Comcast, meanwhile, has received $1.36 billion in grants to cover 226,900 rural locations across the U.S. with broadband. Comcast has pledged to meet around 69% of its BEAD obligations with fiber, and the remainder with cable.
According to the financial analysts at New Street Research, U.S. state regulators have so far allocated just 9% of BEAD grants to fixed wireless providers. The bulk (85%) of grants were awarded to fiber operators. Satellite providers like SpaceX and Amazon received 4% of the funding, while cable operators received 2%.
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