In April 2019 my daughter and I were watching the NCAA final between Virginia and Texas Tech (and rooting for her school TTU). We noticed about halfway through the game that practically every ad we had seen was about 5G. Verizon was busy showing us speed tests from millimeter-wave cellphones receiving gigabit speeds. Not to be outdone, there were a ton of commercials also from T-Mobile and AT&T.

I found it extraordinary that the cellular carriers would spend that much money to buy premium-rate ads for a major sports event. We now know this was part of an all-out blitz on 5G to put pressure on Congress and the FCC to give them more spectrum.

I think that by this fall we’re going to wish we could go back to the 2019 level of ads because I’m predicting by this fall that all we’re going to hear about is cellular and broadband. A lot has changed in the industry since 2019. In more recent sporting events, I noticed that a lot of the ads were from the cable companies touting low-cost cellular service. The cable companies view bundling with cellular as one of the best ways to retain broadband customers – bundling means that when a customer drops broadband they will also lose cheap cellular service.

Dish network will be hitting the market sometime this summer, promising a rollout in a hundred smaller markets and 25 large markets in June. The company already owns Boost Mobile, but Dish is going to spend a lot of money to convince America to consider it for cellular service. This means mountains of advertising to make us aware that Dish is now a cellular company. Dish promises to be aggressive with pricing, so expect this advertising effort to set off a price war from the other carriers.

T-Mobile has already been blitzing the air this year in an attempt to sell its cellular broadband product. The company picked up 400,000 new cellular broadband customers in 2021, most at the end of the year. T-Mobile has a goal to pick up several million new broadband customers this year. T-Mobile’s ultimate goal is to reach 6 to 7 million FWA customers by 2025.

Verizon is also selling fixed wireless broadband and plans to hit the market hard later this summer. The company has a goal to reach 4 to 5 million FWA customers by 2025.

AT&T isn’t going to hit the national market with a push for FWA until some time in 2023, but there is no way that the company is going to sit by and watch the other cellular carriers lure away its customers. Expect AT&T to also be on the air nonstop.

It’s hard to think that national advertising this fall will be much more than cellular and political ads. I’m warning you now to find an outdoor hobby if you don’t want to hear any more about 5G.

We’re also going to see an unprecedented marketing blitz from cable companies and fiber overbuilders. All of the big telcos are furiously building fiber this year. There are aggressive plans to build fiber underway from AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, Windstream, Consolidated, Ziply, Lumen, and many smaller fiber builders. Much of the construction this year will be in cities and county seats, and that is going to mean a whole lot of advertising.

We’ve not seen a lot of national advertising about home broadband, and the marketing wars will likely be local. That’s going to translate to salespeople knocking on doors and a lot of mailers about fiber broadband.

There was some unexpected growth in cellular customers last year. For example, in the third quarter of last year, there was a net addition of 2.3 million new nationwide cellular customers. Industry analysts are chalking this up to businesses buying cell phones for remote employees and more students buying phones because of remote learning during the pandemic.

This kind of market growth is not sustainable since most people have cell phones. That means that the coming cellular marketing wars will largely be a zero-sum game. The only way for a cellular company to grow will be to take customers from another carrier. That’s going to lead to some real desperation – and even more ads. When you watch the first football game this fall, don’t say I didn’t warn you.