Until recently, fixed wireless access (FWA) was a niche business model in the USA, confined mainly to local operators offering broadband services via WiMAX, souped-up WiFi or LTE to rural and other underserved areas. In the brief ascendancy of WiMAX, there was much talk of how a single wireless subscription could support both home broadband and mobile usage, with proprietary products such as Motorola’s Canopy being migrated to the new platform in the hope of stealing a march in 4G. But WiMAX was sidelined, and neither 4G standard had sufficient spectrum capacity or speeds to compete with fiber, where that was economic to instal. Equipment from companies like Airspan continued to support rural deployments, and the big operators, particularly AT&T,…