Tag Archives: AT&T

Supreme Court Examines FCC’s Ability to Fine

The Supreme Court has accepted a case that will determine the FCC’s ability to levy fines against the companies it regulates. The lower court cases that brought the issue to the Supreme Court come from fines that the FCC levied against AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon after the companies sold customer location data. The FCC said that the carriers did not properly vet the companies that bought customer data, and that many of those companies widely resold the data.

The Fifth Circuit Court sided with AT&T and said that the FCC’s process was unconstitutional. The Second Circuit Court sided with the FCC when reviewing the Verizon fine. The DC Circuit also sided with the FCC when reviewing the fine against T-Mobile.  As often happens when lower courts issue conflicting rulings, the Supreme Court has agreed to review the findings of the lower courts.

The Circuit Court cases invoked a Supreme Court ruling in 2024 in the case of SEC v Jaresky. In that case, the defendant was accused of committing fraud and misrepresenting himself to investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Mr. Jaresky $300,000 and ordered him to disgorge the unlawful profits he made of $685,000. Mr. Jaresky appealed to the Supreme Court and argued that the SEC didn’t have the regulatory authority to directly fine him, and that the SEC had violated his right to a jury trial.

The Supreme Court surprisingly sided with Jaresky and ordered that he should have been given the option for a jury trial rather than a trial by an SEC administrative judge. It was obvious after the Jaresky ruling that companies that were fined by other regulatory agencies would make the same claim if they were denied the right of a jury trial. In this case, the three cellular companies made the argument that the FCC fines were unconstitutional and got contradictory rulings from different lower courts. It’s fairly obvious that the carriers went to different courts hoping for conflicting rulings.

This is a major case for the FCC, since a ruling against it eliminates its ability to fine regulated companies for violating FCC rules. The ability to levy fines has always been one of the agency’s most effective enforcement tools and is one of the few remedies that is less drastic than yanking an FCC license to operate. The FCC has been using fines a lot recently in its attempt to cut down on robocalls and texts. The FCC will become a fairly toothless regulatory agency without the ability to levy fines. Carriers, both large and small, will be less afraid to violate FCC rules if they don’t fear that their violation would warrant a referral to the Justice Department.

This is a really interesting tactic by the cellular carriers. If these particular cases had been referred to a jury instead of an administrative judge, it’s not hard to imagine the fines being a lot larger. It’s not hard to imagine a jury that doesn’t like the idea of a giant corporation selling data that shows everywhere they travel with their cellphone.

This also opens up the possibility of State regulators tackling these kinds of issues and issuing fines if the FCC finds itself unable to do so. I have to think that selling customer data violates the law in multiple states.

If the Jaresky case is the precedent, then it’s hard to think the Court won’t side with the carriers and rule against the FCC. This Supreme Court seems to be very much against what they view as regulatory overstepping of authority, and the Jaresky case is only one of their rulings that are weakening federal regulatory agencies.

Falling FWA Speeds

Ookla recently published a report looking at broadband speeds being delivered with FWA cellular broadband offered by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

The report includes the chart shown below that tracks the median download speeds of each carrier, by quarter, since the third quarter of 2023.

There are some interesting stories in the chart:

  • At the end of the third quarter of 2023, the median download speed was nearly the same for all three carriers, between 140 and 150 Mbps.
  • Since then, T-Mobile speeds have increased significantly, peaking at 221.7 Mbps at the end of the first quarter of 2025. T-Mobile’s median speeds are now twice the speeds of AT&T.
  • The Ookla blog talks about the fact that speed for all three carriers dropped from the second quarter of this year to the end of the third quarter. AT&T dropped from 114.3 Mbps to 104.6 Mbps. T-Mobile dropped from 221.7 Mbps to 209.1 Mbps. Verizon has the largest drop from 167.3 Mbps to 137.8 Mbps.

Ookla asks the question of why speeds dropped during those two quarters. They expect that some of the drop is due to foliage that slows down cellular signals from late fall until autumn. Foliage is clearly an issue in many parts of the country.

Ookla also asks the question if the networks are experiencing problems due to oversubscription. The three carriers have seen extraordinary growth. At the end of the third quarter of 2023 there were just under 7 million FWA customers. By the end of the third quarter of this year, the companies had just under 14.5 million customers, having added over 7.5 million FWA customers in two years.

It’s clear that FWA customers put a lot of stress on a cellular network. Assuming that FWA customers are the same as other broadband customers, the average U.S. broadband customer used over 640 gigabytes of broadband per month at the end of the third quarter, compared to 17 gigabytes for the average cellphone customer. From a bandwidth perspective, an FWA customer uses 38 times more cell site resources than a cellular customer.

The questions that Ookla is asking are not easily answered because FWA is not a homogeneous broadband product. Customers must be located near a tower to get the fastest speeds, and speeds drop off as the distance between customers and a tower increases. Consider AT&T, which has been using FWA as a replacement for DSL. This likely means AT&T is offering FWA to customers at a greater distance from towers than the other two carriers, in order to provide that copper alternative. That alone could contribute to AT&T’s lower median speeds.

The FWA market isn’t going to remain static. AT&T recently upgraded 23,000 cell sites with the 3.45 MHz spectrum the company acquired from EchoStar. That should cause a big upward spike in AT&T FWA speeds this quarter.

The Ookla report is fascinating. It will be interesting to watch the FWA speeds over time to better understand seasonality, foliage, and the impact of rapid customer growth.

AT&T Adds New 5G Spectrum

AT&T recently agreed to purchase the 3.45 GHz spectrum from EchoStar and was able to deploy the new spectrum in 23,000 AT&T cell sites in a matter of weeks. The company will use this spectrum to beef up 5G speeds and to also power its FWA cellular home broadband product it markets as AT&T Air. While the spectrum sale still needs to be officially recognized by the FCC, the agreement between EchoStar and AT&T allows for an immediate lease of the spectrum to AT&T.

Anybody following the cellular industry knows that AT&T’s 5G speeds have significantly trailed the speeds being delivered by Verizon and T-Mobile. This should also strengthen AT&T’s recent decision to seriously market its FWA product. AT&T was several years behind Verizon and T-Mobile in marketing wireless home broadband, and just started to seriously market the product in 2024. AT&T had its best quarter of new FWA sales in the third quarter and added 270,000 new customers to bring it to almost 1.3 million FWA customers.

The most interesting thing about this upgrade was the short time required for the upgrade, with 23,000 cell sites upgraded in weeks. Just a decade ago, an upgrade like this would have taken fleets of technicians visiting each cell site, and the update would have normally taken more than a year. I recall stories about the challenges AT&T and the other carriers faced in implementing the first wave of 4G LTE. The LTE upgrades weren’t a one-time event, and every six months to a year there would be new 4G improvements.

AT&T was able to make the upgrade quickly today for several reasons. First, AT&T already owns 3.45 GHz spectrum in some markets, so it has already built the spectrum into its handsets and headends.

But the real news is that AT&T has upgraded cell sites over time to make it easy to make software upgrades remotely. Starting in 2017, AT&T used the required upgrades needed to implement FirstNet, the nationwide first responder network, as an opportunity to also update hardware and software at cell sites for its own purposes. Upgrades were made to hardware and software to prepare cell sites for the next decade of likely upgrades.

It’s easy to think that a company like AT&T probably has a relatively generic configuration at cell sites, but that was never the story historically. AT&T and the other cellular carriers deploy different spectrum in markets depending on the cell licenses they hold in each region. The company operates a range of sizes of cell sites, from tiny rural ones to monster sites in major metropolitan areas. This now also includes a number of microcell sites in markets that are used to serve a large building or a particularly busy neighborhood. AT&T cell sites also vary widely by the age and specific type of electronics at each cell site. The complexity of the historical cellular network makes it easy to understand why it was so challenging to implement a nationwide upgrade.

But AT&T clearly invested a lot in software that can be triggered quickly for a large number of cell sites. This AT&T announcement is good for AT&T, which can instantly realize the benefits of a change like adding new spectrum. It’s good for customers, who see faster speeds immediately. It’s not so good for the many folks who used to travel and make this kind of upgrade.

I’m an AT&T cellular customer, and I took a cellular speed test as I wrote this blog. My download speed is almost 100 Mbps faster than some tests I had taken in the spring. That increase may not come from this upgrade, but it might.

Are Cable Companies “Permanently Impaired”?

KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brandon Nispel recently said in an industry report that “There are reasons to believe that cable is permanently impaired.” By that, he believes that cable companies are going to continue to lose broadband customers as they compete with fiber and FWA cellular wireless.

The problem that cable companies are experiencing stems largely from the time when they enjoyed a near-monopoly status in broadband markets across the country, when their only real competition was DSL provided over copper wires. For well over a decade, cable company broadband customers grew by huge numbers each quarter as people abandoned DSL. The reason for the cable company decline today is that the monopoly is now over and cable companies suddenly have to compete with alternatives like fiber and FWA cellular.

Using the term ‘permanently impaired’ makes it sound like cable companies have inferior broadband. From a technology perspective, fiber is clearly superior to cable broadband. Fiber has lower latency and less jitter for a more reliable signal, and fiber can provide very fast or symmetrical upload speeds for customers who care about upload. But a technology comparison would give the nod to cable over FWA wireless. Cable speeds are faster, and wireless networks generally have more variability of signal over time.

But most customers don’t buy broadband based on the performance specifications. Households that don’t need a lot of upload are perfectly happy with cable company download speeds, with tiers available from 300 Mbps to over a gigabit. Surveys show that a lot of cable company customers are happy with the broadband speed and performance.

The cable companies have been investing in increasing upload speeds, which will satisfy a lot of their broadband customers. Whether they goose upload speeds to 200 Mbps with a mid-split upgrade or invest in symmetrical speeds with a DOCSIS 4.0 upgrade, the increased upload speeds will be enough to satisfy the large majority of households.

I don’t think that most of the households leaving cable companies are doing so because of the technical differences in the technologies, other than perhaps heavy gamers and others who care about the difference in latency and jitter. The cable companies are seeing customers leave because of the way they treated customers over the last decade.

A lot of customers soured over the years on cable companies because of cavalier customer service, where customers had long wait times on the phone, and cable technicians routinely showed up late for customer appointments. It’s been a running joke about how dreadful it is to be stuck in a Comcast call queue. Cable companies didn’t create loyal customers when they had a big rate increase every year for more than a decade, and now have base rates approaching $100. Customers grew frustrated when new customers got low prices while long-term customers continued to pay the full list price. I think it’s the millions of customers who have a sour taste in their mouth for the cable companies who are bailing when they finally have a reasonable alternative that is not DSL.

I’m starting to get public feedback that the big fiber companies like AT&T are headed down the same path as the cable companies. I’ve been contacted in recent months by several AT&T fiber customers who are unhappy with their fiber service. One told me about an outage that lasted for nearly a week before AT&T finally fixed the problem – and then offered them a $3 discount off the bill for their inconvenience. Another customer told me about regular short outages on AT&T fiber – and this customer originally left the cable company for AT&T for this reason. AT&T fiber won a lot of customers when they entered markets because they were cheaper than the big cable companies, but the company has now raised rates for broadband by $5 per month two years in a row, at a time when the company is bragging about record profits.

Nispel is right that cable companies will continue to lose customers. That’s a natural consequence of the end of a near-monopoly. But urban markets will eventually reach an equilibrium, and cable will settle in at a lower penetration rate. We already know what that looks like after seeing how Verizon FiOS and cable companies reached an equilibrium in the Northeast.

The story is not that cable companies are losing customers and are doomed. The real story is that the ISPs displacing them are repeating the same mistakes made by the cable companies, and the public isn’t going to like them any more than the cable companies. A colleague recently observed that competition in urban areas is largely illusory and we’re largely seeing competition between equally inept ISPs. I’m starting to think he’s right.

 

‘Tis the Season (For Layoffs)

It’s going to be a rough holiday season for a lot of industry and tech workers, as communications and tech companies have announced layoffs. According to the hiring experts at Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, the layoffs announced in October were the largest in years. Employers have announced over 1 million job cuts through ten months of this year, already 44% higher than the job cuts for all of 2024.

Technology has the largest number of job cuts for the year, already at over 141,000. There are a number of different reasons for job cuts this year. In October, cost-cutting was the top reason for job cuts (50,437). AI was cited as the reason for 41,039 layoffs. Market and economic conditions were cited as the reason for 21,104 job cuts. The closing of stores and plants accounted for 16,739 cuts, and restructuring was the reason given for 7,588 job cuts.

Here are some of the cuts in the industry as reported by FierceNetworks:

AT&T didn’t announce any formal layoffs but it has still seen staff reduce by over 5,000 positions this year to reach 135,700. Many of the cuts are likely due to the new company policy of mandating that people return to the office five days per week.

Charter reduced staffing by 6,600 in 2024 to reach 94,500. The company recently announced it will be cutting 1,200 more jobs, plus it closed call centers in Ohio and Massachusetts.

Comcast seems poised to reduce staffing but hasn’t announced specific numbers. Rumors are that the company is getting ready to streamline operations.

T-Mobile originally said it was going to lay off the entire staff of 4,100 that came through the acquisition of UScellular. The company ultimately kept “more than half” of these employees.

Verizon actually increased staffing in 2025 and added 800 people this year. The company has been slashing staffing for many years. However, the company told investors when announcing third quarter earnings that it to intends reduce its costs. The Wall Street Journal reported, as I was publishing this blog, that the company plans to cut 15,000 people.  That’s before any impact from the upcoming acquisition of Frontier.

There are a lot of layoffs coming in other parts of the tech industry. Amazon laid off 14,000 people in October and says it will be cutting as many as 30,000 additional corporate jobs. Microsoft eliminated 9,000 positions recently, bringing it to 15,000 for the year. UPS has had the largest cuts with 48,000 jobs eliminated in 2025.

I’m Ready to Call It

I think we can now foresee the demise of traditional telephone service delivered over the PSTN (public switched telephone network). My best guess is the PSTN will ether be dead or dying by the end of 2030. This doesn’t mean the death of telephone voice service, but the end of the regulated service that has been offered by telephone companies. Any voice products that remain will be delivered using VoIP.

The death of the PSTN is being fostered by the FCC, which has made it much easier for telephone companies to tear down or decommission copper telephone networks. The FCC began the process by providing a two-year moratorium on notifications for taking down copper in July and followed that up more recently with a formal docket to make the rules permanent.

Eliminating copper lines is not the same as eliminating the PSTN. I expect the FCC will formally announce rules to end the PSTN soon. But even if the FCC doesn’t take specific action, I expect the big telcos to start dismantling the PSTN in pieces on their own.

The PSTN consists of a private network owned collectively by telephone companies. The PSTN is a series of regional networks that surround a large tandem switch that connects to the telcos and CLECs in the region. The connections between each voice provider and the tandem are called trunks. These are transport routes, many still using the old TDM technology based on T1s, to deliver the traffic. Local voice providers can also have direct trunks to other local voice providers in the area, to the largest long-distance carriers, or to the large cellular carriers.

The PSTN is also the mechanism used to route calls between a local voice provider and the many other carriers in the country. There is a complex set of routing tables that instruct tandem switches how to route calls to reach every registered telephone number in the system. The PSTN is also the starting point for routing other kinds of calls, like international long distance and 800 numbers.

This may sound too complex to break apart, but the biggest telcos have been talking about this for over twenty years. They do not want to be responsible for taking care of the local PSTN arrangements, which costs them money and causes a lot of maintenance. I remember sitting in meetings twenty years ago that discussed ways that the regional tandem switching network could be deactivated over time. There was a lot of investigation done on the topic ten years ago at the FCC, but that effort fizzled out somehow.

The impetus to dismantle the PSTN was always driven by money. The big long-distance carriers were paying huge amounts in access charges to get ‘access’ to the local networks of the many voice providers in the country. The FCC took an axe to many of those fees, and after the magnitude of spending on access decreased, I think the focus on finishing the process died.

The largest telcos like AT&T have always envisioned a much-simplified replacement for the PSTN. Twenty years ago, AT&T talked about a vision where it would replace hundreds of tandem switches nationwide with perhaps two for the whole country. Every carrier that used one of its tandems would be responsible for buying transport to reach one of the big new switches. We can’t ever get rid of the function of routing calls, but this vision would shift most of the cost of the PSTN function away from the big telcos onto each company that originates or terminates voice calls. Under the AT&T vision, the PSTN would be greatly simplified by greatly decreasing the number of locations where calls are exchanged.

There is nothing stopping the big telcos from doing this, other than having a method in place to make sure that calls continue to route. The big carriers are feeling emboldened by the current FCC to wash away old systems, and I think they are now ready to finally tackle this.

AT&T Raises Rates

AT&T announced it will raise broadband rates as of December 1 by $5 per month. This is the second year in a row that the company has raised rates by that amount. The fact that the company is raising rates in today’s environment is an interesting choice. I suspect the rate increase says several things about AT&T. The increase tells me that the company is meeting its fiber penetration goals and doesn’t think a rate increase will hurt its market share. It also speaks to a belief that customers perceive fiber as the superior technology that people are willing to pay for.

This will take AT&T fiber broadband prices to $69 for 300 Mbps, $80 for 500 Mbps, $95 for 1 Gbps, and $160 for 2 Gbps. Before the two rate increases, AT&T was priced noticeably lower than its cable competitors, but that is no longer the case.

The rate increase will apply to existing customers, although AT&T is not raising the rate for it’s low-income plan. In a move that always mystifies long-time customers, AT&T is still offering aggressively low rates for new customers while asking for more revenue from long-time customers. While writing this blog, I saw the AT&T website is offering introductory rates of 300 Mbps for $42 and 1 Gbps for $50. AT&T is also offering a low rate for its FWA cellular broadband of $47 per month.

AT&T is giving customers the typical story that the rate increases are needed to ensure that customers will receive a high level of service. But the company is not mentioning to its customers that it had a net income of $4.9 billion and free cash flow generated of $4.4 billion in the second quarter of this year.

This has to be good news for the big cable companies that compete against AT&T fiber. If the cable companies decide not to raise rates now, they can advertise against AT&T for doing so. However, this could also give cable companies the cover to raise rates again, and I’m sure this announcement is being discussed in cable Board rooms.

What I find most interesting about the rate increases is that the big cable companies have spent a lot of advertising dollars talking about lower rates. Cable companies are in a panic about losing customers to both fiber and FWA and have mostly fought back with lower introductory rates and special promotions.

Charter had a rate increase this year and raised broadband rates by $2 per month, starting with the July 2025 billing cycle. That’s the lowest rate increase from the company in years and follows a $3 rate increase in the summer of 2024. Charter has been pushing a two- or three-year price lock where rates are guaranteed without customers having to sign a contract.

Comcast has not been so cautious with rate increases and announced an across-the-board 5% rate increase for broadband at the end of 2024. It will be interesting to see what they will do this year. But Comcast has also been pushing low-rate deals, including a promotion in April that gave new customers a 5-year price lock.

These annual rate increases always prompt small ISPs to ask if they should raise rates. The majority of small ISPs do not raise rates every year. I know a number of cooperatives that typically only raise rates every three to five years. It’s ironic that, on the whole, these rate increases will mean that urban broadband rates will become significantly more expensive than rural rates, mostly due to urban rates getting increased every year. There are exceptions, and some rural companies have high rates, but most do not.

Broadband Shorts September 2025

The following topics are interesting, just too short of a topic for a full blog.

Criminal Damage to Undersea Fibers. Finland filed criminal charges against the top officers of an oil tanker in connection with damage done to undersea cables in December. The National Prosecution Authority in Helsinki indicted the captain and two first officers of the Eagle S, a Cook Islands-registered tanker that is suspected of being part of a shadow fleet of ships that transports Russian oil in violation of international sanctions. The officers are charged with aggravated criminal mischief for allegedly dragging the ship’s anchor for more than 56 miles across the Gulf of Finland on Christmas Day, cutting five electric and telecom cables and causing almost $70 million in damage. Press releases at the time assumed the damage was accidental.

AT&T Class Action Lawsuits. Millions of AT&T customers are eligible to file claims in the $177 million legal settlement related to two data breaches. The first data breach happened in March 2024 and involved customer data, including date of birth and social security numbers. The second breach in July 2024 exposed calling and text records for nearly all AT&T cellular customers. Multiple lawsuits were filed against AT&T and were consolidated into a single settlement, with $149 million for the first breach and $28 million for the second.

Starlink Introduces Introductory Rates. Starlink has joined the ISP competitive fray and now offers introductory rates to attract new subscribers in rural areas where the company has excess capacity. In affected areas, the introductory rate for monthly broadband is cut from $120 to as low as $85. The company also introduced a new Lite plan for as low as $59 per month for customers with low broadband needs. The plan doesn’t guarantee broadband, and speeds might be deprioritized in times of heavy usage in the area. Starlink has also slashed the price of its receiver in some areas to as low as $89. The discounted rates are only guaranteed for a year, and if customers switch plans or have a service interruption, their rate reverts to the full rates.

Windstream Reunites with Uniti. A decade after the company split into two parts, Windstream and Uniti are reuniting into one company. The original split was unique in the industry and established Uniti as a Reit (Real Estate Investment Trust) that took ownership of the network and leased it back to the telco. The companies are being recombined since the company believes the value of the recombined business will be greater than the value of the two separate companies. The new company will retain the Uniti name and the UNIT stock symbol. The company will keep the Kinetic brand for Windstream fiber customers.

Wi-Fi 7 Adoption at 2%. Ookla reports that one year after introduction, WiFi 7 adoption is just under 2% in the U.S. Nobody expected instant adoption because ISPs need to update customer routers, and customers need to upgrade home devices to be able to use the 6 GHz spectrum being used for WiFi 7. Ookla reports that average speeds with WiFi 7 are almost 400 Mbps faster than the average speeds on Wi-Fi 6E devices and more than 600 Mbps faster than basic Wi-Fi 6. The big advantage of WiFi 7 is the multiple channels available with 6 GHz and the larger size of the channels, which together eliminate contention at a customer site of multiple devices trying to use a small number of channels.

FCC to Bar Chinese Testing Labs. The FCC has begun the process to withdraw the ability of three Chinese labs to certify devices for us in the U.S. The FCC has already withdrawn the testing capability of four other Chinese labs. Many people are not aware that the FCC approves broadband and wireless devices to make sure they meet the claimed specifications. This is particularly important for wireless devices since poorly designed devices can bleed into nearby spectrum bands. In recent years, as many as 75% of devices have been tested and certified in China.

AT&T Accelerating Copper Retirements. The FCC placed a two-year moratorium on notifications related to copper retirement in March and proposed changes to make this permanent. AT&T reacted quickly to the change in regulation and has begun the process of retiring copper in around 500 wire centers, or 10% of the AT&T telco exchanges.

Death of the Fourth Cellular Carrier

The press has been full of recent headlines saying that EchoStar is finished as the fourth facility-based cellular network. EchoStar announced that it is selling 50 MHz of low and midspan spectrum to AT&T for $23 billion, to close in mid-year 2026. The spectrum being sold includes a 20 MHz swath of 600 MHz and a 30 MHz chunk of 3.45 GHz.

Over the weekend, it was announced that EchoStar sold 50 MHz of its AWS-4 and H-block spectrum to Space X for $17 billion to use for Starlink’s direct-to-cell service that will launch with the next generation of satellites. Exchostar’s Boost cellular customers will get access to that new service when it’s launched.

As a reminder, the EchoStar merged with DISH Networks and started using the brand name EchoStar for the cellular business. DISH Networks was promoted by the FCC to become a new nationwide cell carrier when the FCC approved the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. DISH raised billions of dollars and started down the path of building a nationwide cell network. In doing so, DISH chose the interesting path of using open RAN electronics, which it believed would be more flexible and cost less than the electronics used by the other big cell companies.

DISH has been fighting for years to keep control of large swaths of spectrum. In addition to the spectrum being sold, the company holds 200 MHz, 700 MHz, and 1.7 GHz spectrum. The company had a hard time justifying all of the spectrum since as of May of this year, the company only had 1.25 million customers riding its own cellular network. The company was under investigation from the FCC for holding unneeded spectrum, but these sales should quiet that issues. EchoStar recently announced that it plans to launch a satellite constellation to compete for cellular service some of its AWS spectrum.

Echostar has been struggling financially, and recently averted a Chapter 11 filing when it was late in making a scheduled debt payment on July 1, but was able to do so before the 30-day grace period.  For those not familiar with the history of DISH Network, the largest stockholder is Charlie Ergen. He’s been adept over the years at finding ways to get out of threatening financial binds.

Echostar will continue to operate its other subsidiaries which include Dish TV, online platform Sling, and Hushes high-orbit satellite.

The timing of the spectrum sales is interesting because the company was finally making some headway in the cellular industry. When EchoStar announced its 2Q 2025 financial results, the big surprise was the continued growth of new cellular customers for the Boost Mobile brand. Echostar saw net growth of 212,000 customers for the quarter, up from 150,000 in the first quarter. This back-to-back growth is surprising since the company was losing customers a year earlier. Boost Mobile had 9 million customers when the company was first purchased, and had slipped to a low of 7.4 million customers.

As the headline says, this sale means the death of the EchoStar cellular network. The company discussed how it will try to sell off or scrap the assets.

The second quarter net growth for all of the major cellular carriers is as follows:Readers who haven’t seen a chart of cellular customer growth might be surprised to see how well Comcast and Charter are doing. It seems like both companies are putting a lot of emphasis on cellular growth to help offset the continued losses of broadband customers. The Verizon numbers might look dismal, but both Charter and Comcast largely ride the Verizon cellular networks with resold MVNO arrangements.

The sale of spectrum to AT&T is not good news for cable companies since AT&T said it would use the spectrum, in part, to expand its FWA home cellular business. AT&T was late to the game in launching FWA, and had 1 million customers at the end of the second quarter, compared to 5.1 million for Verizon and 7.3 million for T-Mobile.

AT&T’s Landline Alternative

AT&T announced at the end of 2024 that it plans to retire all copper networks by the end of 2029. The FCC noted in a recent filing that the use of traditional telephone service has decreased rapidly over time. At the peak in 2003, incumbent telcos had 181 landline telephone customers. By the middle of 2024 that had reduced to 18 million traditional landlines along with 64 million voice-over-IP voice customers.

The transition away from copper is going largely unnoticed in urban areas since customers typically have good alternatives to a landline. Surveys have shown that practically everybody has a cellphone, and in cities, except for dead zones in cellular coverage, the cellular network provides a good alternative to landlines.

However, there are still a lot of rural customers for whom a landline is the only reliable communications path to the world. AT&T was catching a lot of public grief when it started to tear down rural copper networks in areas where customers were told the only alternative was cellular service. Because of spotty or nonexistent rural cellular coverage, many rural residents never purchased an expensive cellphone. While a cellphone can be used to make voice calls, a cellphone is not an alternative for connecting medical devices, analog burglar alarms, and other technologies that had relied on the landline connection.

In 2024, AT&T conducted a test of a new technology it labeled as AT&T Phone – Advanced (AP-A). The service relies on an in-home cellular receiver that provides VoIP that can be plugged into existing telephone wiring to provide connections to existing telephone sets and devices connected to the customer’s copper.

The technology worked as planned, and the FCC approved the new technology as a landline replacement. The FCC’s initial approval only concerned a small test conducted of the device in Oklahoma. It’s not clear how widely AT&T is marketing this product, but the company touted the trial to the FCC as being a robust replacement product for rural landlines.

You might wonder about how the product replaces DSL, and it doesn’t. This product is for the rural home that wants to maintain only a landline. It’s worth noting that now that the FCC has labeled broadband as a service, not regulated under Title II, the FCC has no rules that require telcos to offer an alternative to eliminating DSL broadband. This was made explicitly clear in July when the FCC created a 2-year moratorium on having to notify the public about copper replacements.

Rural DSL has rarely been an adequate product due to the fact that customers are typically too far from the DSL hub to get any appreciable speed. But AT&T does have a rural DSL replacement in places where the company has enabled rural cell sites to provide FWA cellular home broadband. As of the second quarter of this year, AT&T has installed over 1 million customers on the FWA product. The FWA product is only effective within a few miles of cell sites that have been FWA-enabled.

It looks like AT&T will be able to expand its FWA footprint after the announcement that the company purchased a pile of spectrum from Echostar. Analysts are already speculating that the primary benefit of the new spectrum is to greatly expand the FWA broadband product.