Below is a table showing the broadband additions for many of the largest ISPs for both the first quarter of 2024 and the fourth quarter of 2023. This list is not complete because some of the big privately held companies like Cox and Mediacom don’t announce total broadband customers.

However, the carriers on this list represent a huge percentage of the broadband industry, so seeing their performance gives us a peek at the trends in the industry.

It’s clear after two quarters of overall losses that cable companies have turned the corner from continually gaining customers to now losing customers. This is a consequence of increased competition from fiber overbuilders and FWA cellular wireless.

One of the interesting statistics from the quarter is that AT&T finally unleashed it’s FWA product and added 110,000 new customers for the quarter. For now, it seems like the company is largely using this as a DSL replacement in rural areas, but it seems likely that the company will pick up other customers as well.

For the quarter, the sale of FWA cellular slowed down for T-Mobile and Verizon, from 929,000 in the fourth quarter of last year to 759,000 in the first quarter. But FWA still counts for practically all of the net broadband gains for the quarter.

The large telcos had a small collective gain for the quarter, which was held down by the continued large losses of DSL customers by Lumen. Hidden in the tiny overall gain for large telcos is the fact that all of them report continued good gains of fiber customers that is still being largely offset by continued loss of copper customers.

Another interesting number to focus on is the decreasing size of the overall net gain for this group of companies. Everything I’ve been reading predicts a much smaller number of total net customer additions for 2024, which is due to two issues. First is the lower number of new housing startups due to continued high interest rates. There is also a general sense that the entire industry is finally reaching maturity.

What’s not seen in these numbers is the impact of the end of ACP, which ceased operations in mid-May. While many of these ISPs have a temporary solution to keep ACP customers for a few months, there are a lot of predictions that millions of customers might disappear by the end of this year. We’re probably not going to see that in a meaningful way until at least the third or fourth quarter of the year.