I agree we need internet options. I doubt Starry is going to come out of this healthy. Starry eliminated half its workforce in 2022. At that point, you're the walking dead - especially in a capital intensive industry. You need to be spending money building a network that can sign up customers and that simply isn't going to happen when you've laid off half your workforce.

Already, T-Mobile's fixed wireless business is 26x larger and Verizon's is 9x larger than Starry. In the coming years, it will be relatively straightforward for the big wireless companies to adopt Starry's strategy to augment their more traditional network. T-Mobile or Verizon could cover a large area with mid-band spectrum and then use millimeter-wave spectrum with installed antennas on large buildings offering improved speed and capacity for those buildings. Verizon has installed some street-level mmWave and could also use that to augment capacity in areas that need it.

I'm sad about Starry, but I think the future of fixed wireless is going to involve a much more layered approach that can impact more people and that will require low and mid-band spectrum in addition to mmWave. Low and mid-band spectrum allows a company to cover a reasonably broad area and start signing up customers and if the need arises they can augment capacity using mmWave.

I think there's a lot of competition coming to home broadband over the next few years, but I don't think it'll be from Starry. T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M customers by year-end 2025 (less than 3 years away) and that might not sound like a lot, but it would surpass Verizon's Fios which only has 6.7M customers. Even though it would be smaller than Comcast, it would be putting a lot of pressure on incumbent cable companies. Verizon is looking to have fixed wireless available to 50M households by year-end 2025 and while they're projecting fewer customers than T-Mobile, it's easy to see how availability to around 40% of American households would have a huge impact on the market.

Broadband monopolies have been acting in anti-consumer ways because they know you don't have another option. Even if you don't personally want T-Mobile or Verizon fixed-wireless, it can still put a lot of pressure on an incumbent monopoly to treat you better.