I follow what the operators tell Wall St, because the executives have large personal financial stakes in getting it right (modulo fraud, but lets trust for now).
For example, at the last investor day that AT&T held, they indicated [0:pdf] that their growth plans are in broadband fiber, not building more 5G capacity to serve a surge in traffic. Reading their charts and knowing how AT&T traditionally worked, I believe that they are going to try to cut the expense of running the 5G network via various optimizations and redirect capital heavily to go after the fiber broadband market instead, using convergence (ahem: price bundling) to win subscribers.
(I bet it really stuck in their craw that Comcast mastered the bundle so well that they even built a successful MVNO on the back of their xfinity customer base and parked their tanks on AT&Ts lawn while the latter was futzing about with HBO.)
However, bundling is a price compression game, not an ARPU growth game. If you start at $100 a month and then begin chipping away with autopay discounts, mobile convergence, free visa gift cards and all that nonsense, pretty soon you are selling broadband for $35 a month and can't make it work except with truly cruddy service, which leads to high churn rates. So we'll see how this turns out.
My understanding is that 6G is expected to make use of a good decentralised fibre network, with small radio units at the end points of this network providing the wireless contact point. With interoperability being on the books for 6G, whoever controls the fibre network is in for a lot of money (unless the article we're commenting on is right).
So it might make sense for operators to focus on developing fibre regardless.
Yes, this distributed radio idea is a feature of both 5G and 6G. You stick the dumbest, dullest parts of the radio electronics up on the tower and trunk them all back over fiber to an aggregation/control point a few kms away, and then trunk the agg points back to the packet core a few hundreds of km away. That needs a lot of fiber to carry the backhaul. I dont know if operators are thinking of using this fiber to also incidentally deliver broadband service, but today that doesnt happen: for one, oftentimes the mobile operator doesnt own the fiber, they just lease it.
For example, at the last investor day that AT&T held, they indicated [0:pdf] that their growth plans are in broadband fiber, not building more 5G capacity to serve a surge in traffic. Reading their charts and knowing how AT&T traditionally worked, I believe that they are going to try to cut the expense of running the 5G network via various optimizations and redirect capital heavily to go after the fiber broadband market instead, using convergence (ahem: price bundling) to win subscribers.
(I bet it really stuck in their craw that Comcast mastered the bundle so well that they even built a successful MVNO on the back of their xfinity customer base and parked their tanks on AT&Ts lawn while the latter was futzing about with HBO.)
However, bundling is a price compression game, not an ARPU growth game. If you start at $100 a month and then begin chipping away with autopay discounts, mobile convergence, free visa gift cards and all that nonsense, pretty soon you are selling broadband for $35 a month and can't make it work except with truly cruddy service, which leads to high churn rates. So we'll see how this turns out.
[0:pdf] https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/reports-...