T-Mobile expands fiber service to two Colorado cities

T-Mobile is expanding its fiber ambitions. The company said it will soon begin offering its T-Mobile Fiber service in Pueblo and Northglenn, Colorado, following its launch of the service in parts of New York City in 2021.

Company officials have described T-Mobile Fiber as a test of its "uncarrier" brand atop a fiber Internet service. It appears that testing has been successful given that T-Mobile is expanding it to two more markets.

The two new Colorado markets are now listed alongside New York City on the operator's T-Mobile Fiber website.

Figure 1: T-Mobile's fiber website shows the service is coming shortly to Northglenn, Colorado.
(Source: T-Mobile Fiber)

The company also confirmed on Twitter that Northglenn, Colorado, is "one of the select locations T-Mobile Fiber is coming to soon."

"T-Mobile Fiber is a new offering we’re exploring to help bring additional, much-needed connectivity to more people. We are delivering home broadband service over fiber-optic lines using local fiber providers’ fiber-optic networks in New York, NY, and Pueblo, CO and Northglenn, CO," a T-Mobile official confirmed in a statement. Reports of the move first surfaced on Reddit and then on The Mobile Report.

According to the financial analysts at New Street Research, the company partnered with Pilot Fiber in New York City to sell 950 Mbit/s connections, and is currently covering 700 buildings with the service. T-Mobile said it's Intrepid Fiber's network in Pueblo and Northglenn.

T-Mobile officials haven't said much about the company's fiber strategy.

"It's another tool in the toolbox," T-Mobile's outgoing networking chief, Neville Ray, said at a recent investor event, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. Ray was responding to a question about the company's fiber service in New York. "We continue to evaluate. We're trying to figure out. The fun piece there is when you put the T-Mobile brand and distribution and what we stand for on a fiber opportunity, that's the piece we're really trialing and testing to understand how powerful could that be for our business."

Ray added: "There will be places, I'm sure, where that model does make sense."

Fiber sits next to T-Mobile's fixed wireless access (FWA) service for in-home broadband services. FWA relies on T-Mobile's 5G network; the company currently counts roughly 3 million FWA subscribers.

T-Mobile isn't the only telecom company eyeing the fiber opportunity. Providers both big and small – ranging from AT&T to Frontier to Charter Communications – are working to expand their fiber offerings across the US. And hanging over the space is more than $40 billion in government subsidies, mostly for fiber networks in rural areas, that ought to be allocated on a state-by-state basis in the coming years.

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— Mike Dano, Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies, Light Reading | @mikeddano