According to T-Mobile, the speeds supported by its new 5G network in midband spectrum are pushing its customers off Wi-Fi networks.
That's noteworthy considering 5G proponents have long argued that such networks will carry more and more of the world's overall data traffic when compared with wired and Wi-Fi networks."T-Mobile reported growth in the usage of its hotspot service.
The company said that 13% fewer of the customers on its most expensive Magenta Max 5G data plan are connecting to Wi-Fi.
And in terms of their hotspot usage – whereby customers can tether other gadgets like laptops and tablets to their 5G connection via a Wi-Fi link – T-Mobile said 80% more Magenta Max customers are hosting a Wi-Fi hotspot over their 5G connection, and that their hotspot usage is up 20% on average during the weekends.
Finally, T-Mobile said that its Magenta Max customers are consuming three times more hotspot data per month compared with other T-Mobile customers.
According to statistics from network equipment vendor Cisco, fixed and Wi-Fi networks handled 52.6% of the world's total Internet traffic in 2021.
Meanwhile, mobile networks – including 4G and 5G networks – handled just 20.5% of the world's total Internet traffic in 2021.But, according to Cisco's findings, the trend lines favor mobile.
The firm reported that fixed and Wi-Fi networks handled around 52.1% of total Internet traffic in 2016 – virtually the same number as 2021.
Meantime, global mobile networks handled just 9.8% of total Internet traffic in 2016, but that figure more than doubled in 2021.T-Mobile hopes to speed up that broad trend by selling 5G-powered home Internet connections.
Already T-Mobile counts more than 500,000 of these fixed wireless Internet customers, and expects that number to grow to up to 8 million within the next few years.