I recently looked at the reported broadband subscriber counts from the largest publicly traded ISPs. Most of these statistics come from the quarterly reports of the ISPs. I decided to look at the change in broadband subscribers compared to last year, which I suspect tells more of a story than looking at the change only for the most recent quarter.
There are not a lot of surprises. Cable companies are losing customers, telcos have started to add net customers, and FWA cellular wireless ISPs still dominate the industry in terms of customer acquisition.
By reading the industry press, one might assume that cable companies are bleeding customers. The losses for the sector are significant, at over a 2% loss of customers over a year, but not as high as you might expect.
Telcos have definitely turned the corner after having suffered losses annually over the last decade as customers bailed on DSL. These companies are still losing DSL customers, which masks the significant growth of fiber subscribers.
FWA growth continues to be astounding. The third quarter of 2025 saw the biggest quarterly gain yet of over 1 million new customers, and AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon account for most of the overall gain in broadband customers for the industry.
Outside of the FWA carriers, the biggest percentage gainers were Frontier and Shentel. The biggest percentage losers were Lumen and WOW!.
This chart will change going forward. Frontier should be merging with Verizon. Cox, which isn’t on the list because it’s privately held, should be merging with Charter. A lot of Lumen fiber customers will be moving to AT&T.
I find it interesting that the entire sub count grew by 3.3M. Where did they come from since dsl customers where included in broadband numbers before? Acquisition?
the migration from small companies to big companies. the subscriber count numbers are entirely based on self-reporting and small ISPs aren’t important enough to be counted.
this ‘growth’ is the elimination of small ISPs.