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Less than three months after AT&T spent $23 billion to pick up two spectrum leases from Boost Mobile's parent firm EchoStar—a move that busted Boost's bid to build a fourth nationwide wireless network—AT&T subscribers should now see faster connections.
The carrier boasted in a press release and blog post that the now-active 3.45GHz spectrum would allow speed improvements of up to 80% for its 5G mobile broadband and as much as 55% for its Internet Air fixed-wireless home broadband, plus more network capacity overall.
AT&T says it needed only "a few weeks" to light up this complement to its fast C-band service across almost 23,000 base stations covering 48 states (sorry, Alaska and Hawaii). Although it requires newer modem chipsets, the 3.45GHz band has become an AT&T specialty. Verizon isn't using it, while T-Mobile passed on a chance to pick up some when it bought most of the regional carrier UScellular.
The August transaction with EchoStar saw AT&T get about 30MHz of capacity in that band, plus roughly 20MHz of 600MHz spectrum. It has yet to announce deployment plans for that second set of frequencies, which in general provide wider coverage at the cost of slower speeds.
Previously, EchoStar's Boost Mobile subsidiary—which Sprint had spun off as a condition of T-Mobile buying that carrier in 2020—had appeared to be making decent progress toward its goal of building a nationwide 5G network on an Open RAN (Radio Access Network) architecture that would support mixing components from different network vendors.
Boost had met a set of FCC deadlines to build out its 5G network, and our tests of Boost's 5G service around Manhattan had found it remarkably fast. But Boost's finances looked much cloudier, with EchoStar warning investors earlier in August of "substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern."
And where previous FCC chairs had supported Boost's bid to become a fourth nationwide carrier, the commission's current chair, Brendan Carr, had questioned Boost's habit of holding but not using other spectrum assets.
Since AT&T's purchase, SpaceX has made two separate purchases of EchoStar spectrum to upgrade its Starlink cellular service; one in September, another in November. Boost continues to offer wireless service, but it's now heavily based on resold AT&T coverage.
AT&T, meanwhile, touts not just improved performance for its mobile and residential customers (as well as first responders on its FirstNet service) but wider availability of Internet Air. Its press release quotes COO Jeff McElfresh as saying the EchoStar spectrum "gives us the runway to expand availability of AT&T Internet Air for consumers and businesses."
AT&T only launched that fixed-wireless-access (FWA) option two summers ago, well after T-Mobile and Verizon had launched their own home-5G services and begun poaching millions of customers from cable broadband services.
"FWA" is now the fastest-growing category of broadband, with operators of these services among the most-liked internet providers in PCMag's Readers' Choice survey as well as in reports from J.D. Power and the American Customer Satisfaction Index. AT&T has found another reason to like it, saying in August that as it builds out its fiber-optic broadband network, it will work to upsell Air subscribers on that faster, fixed connectivity.