LT Therivel: Let’s start with fixed wireless. So our approach really is — I mean, I suppose from a deployment perspective, it’s a little bit different. It’s almost the inverse of what T-Mobile is doing, but I actually don’t think we view the market that differently. And so let me just explain where we’ve seen huge success in this product is in rural and then, let’s call it, the bridge between rural and suburban. And recall that right now what we’re deploying is really, it’s basically a low band product. We have a couple of mid-band — a couple of millimeter wave trials. But the vast majority of our sales of this product thus far have been on low band. And we feel proud of the experience that we’re delivering, but that is not a particularly high speed experience.
To me, it speaks to the opportunity that’s in front of us, because when we do put — when we do start launching this on mid band, we’ll be able to deliver a product tentatively, we’re looking at 300 megs down. And when you deliver that, that opens up, I think, a whole new market opportunity for us. And so if I think about 2023, still, we see a lot of growth potential ahead just on low band. That product will be rural, call it suburban. We see a lot of opportunity when there’s a cable monopoly. This product works very well against cable. As we launch mid band starting in 2023, we’ll then, I think, be able to move from suburban to more closer to urban areas, because we’ll have a highly competitive product. The one place, and I’ve been consistent about this.
The one place I don’t see this humping is where there’s robust fiber to the home. We’ll still obviously happily sell to whichever customers want to buy it from us. But I mean, the basic physics of fiber to the home would say that those customers should go with fiber and fiber players will be able to price it accordingly. But we think this product is compelling everywhere else, and that’s a really substantive geography that’s still available to us. So we see a lot of runway with this, not just in ’22 with our — in ’23 with low band, but in ’24 and beyond as you roll mid-band now. Let me talk BEAD for a moment, and then I’ll hand it over to Michelle so she can give you a sense of how telecom is viewing the BEAD opportunity. We’re still quite optimistic about BEAD and about BEAD dollars flowing to fixed wireless.
We’ve done both a fair amount of math on our own and we have a lot of conversations with states. And our sense is that notwithstanding $46 billion going across the United States that that is still not going to be sufficient to cover every home and business with fiber. And I know there’s people that are trumpeting that and they are saying that this — we can connect everything with fiber. Those people have not spent much time in rural America. I have. And there’s a lot of places out there where it simply is not going to be cost efficient, neither cost efficient nor time efficient to connect these homes and businesses with fiber. It’s a tough sell to go to people in rural areas and to say, hey, no problem, we’re going to be able to cover you, just wait 10 years.
