You probably haven’t noticed, but the press is no longer full of articles claiming that FWA cellular broadband is a poor broadband choice for customers. For several years, there was a constant stream of quotes by executives of big cable companies and telcos saying that FWA was a flash in the pan that was only selling quickly because of low prices. They said that FWA performance was erratic and cellular carriers didn’t have enough excess capacity to provide a reliable broadband connection. There were many predictions made that FWA would plateau as word of mouth spread that FWA performance was substandard.

But that plateau hasn’t happened. As you can see in the table below, the recent quarterly growth of FWA has held steady for each of the three major FWA providers. Below the FWA numbers are the overall net new customers of the publicly traded cable companies and telcos. The big telcos have finally turned the corner and are installing more fiber customers than they are disconnecting DSL. All of the big cable companies are losing customers each quarter. Not reflected in these numbers are customers being added by fiber overbuilders, and the growth of fixed wireless and satellite broadband. Even considering the growth of the industry not shown on the table, it’s clear that FWA cellular is still dominating the broadband industry in terms of customer acquisition. FWA cellular will eventually plateau, but it doesn’t look like we are close to that day yet. The FWA carriers got a recent burst when Congress gave the FCC authority to renew spectrum auctions and to consider allocating as much as 800 megahertz of spectrum for 5G usage over the next five years. Leading up to that legislation, cellular carriers had started to beat the “we’re out of spectrum’ drum and claiming that the U.S. was losing the 5G battle to China. That argument worked in the past and seemingly has worked again.

I have to think that a big part of the hope for new spectrum is to support FWA. There is a huge usage difference between a normal cellphone customer and an FWA customer. Various industry statistics show that the average cellphone customer uses a little over 20 gigabytes of data per month, while OpenVault says that the average home broadband customer used 663 gigabytes per month at the end of the first quarter of 2025. Not only do FWA customers use thirty times more data than a cellphone customer, they use it in a very different way, with home and work computers connected to broadband for hours on end, while cellphone data usage tends to happen in shorter bursts.

The cable companies and telcos were not wrong when they said that cell towers weren’t originally designed to do home broadband, but with over 13.4 million FWA customers, it’s clear that the cell carriers have figured out a way to make it work. The one glaring weakness of FWA is that carriers will still cut FWA speeds to near zero any time that a cell site gets too busy – carriers are going to continue to prioritize cell customers over FWA customers. But the carriers are considering dedicating spectrum just for FWA, which would eliminate this issue. That will be a lot easier to do after more spectrum comes onto the market.

I’ve always followed predictions of where the broadband industry is headed. A decade ago, there were zero predictions that cellular carriers would capture a significant portion of the home broadband market. Cell carriers have offered cellular hot spots for many years, but the products weren’t popular because of slow speeds and high prices, with most hotspot plans with monthly data caps nearly identical to cellphones.

Verizon recently said it has a goal of reaching 8-9 million FWA customers by 2030. T-Mobile has a more aggressive plan to reach 12 million customers by the end of 2028. The industry segment is far from running out of gas.