I recently looked at the reported broadband subscriber counts from the largest publicly traded ISPs for the end of 2025. Most of these statistics come from the quarterly reports of the ISPs. The table below looks at the change in subscribers for the fourth quarter and also for the whole year of 2025.
The story hasn’t changed a lot during the year. FWA cellular ISPs still dominate new net customer gains in the industry. Cable companies continue to lose customers. Telcos are growing by adding more fiber customers than they are losing copper customers.
There are a few interesting stories in these numbers. There were a lot of industry predictions that FWA cellular sales had peaked and would be slowing. However, the fourth quarter is the largest net customer gain ever for the market segment.
The additions for the telcos mask that growth in fiber customers is being diluted by continued losses of copper customers.
Breezeline says that it has turned around losses. The company had been losing 7,000 customers per quarter, and for the fourth quarter, it was down only 1,000. The company has hopes of getting back to net growth.
I don’t know how much longer making this table will make any sense. Just in the last quarter, Ziply Fiber and Consolidated Communications fell off the table when they went private. In the first quarter, Frontier will merge with Verizon and Lumen’s fiber customers will shift to AT&T. A little later this year, Cox, which is currently privately held, will be added to the Charter numbers. There are a number of aggressive fiber overbuilders that are privately held and not included in the table.
Wonder how many net “adds” are a secondary/backup service that used to be too expensive to have when the monopolies ruled the roost.
For example, now that many of my locations have options, many are paying less for service from two faster providers than they used to for a single provider. Doesn’t invalidate the above numbers, would just be an interesting breakout that is likely impossible to get real numbers on.
I would say very little. The most common backup services for business wouldn’t be on this chart because they’re not ‘FWA’, they are data sims in routers.
Also, starlink is probably the biggest vendor in the backup connectivity space right now and they’re not on this chart.