Tag Archives: FWA

Competing Against the Bundle

For many years, competing against the bundle referred to anybody who tried to compete against a cable company that offered the triple-play of broadband, cable TV, and telephone. I conducted market surveys for years, and it was not unusual to find 60% to 70% of cable company subscribers who were buying the bundle.

The triple-play bundle was a powerful marketing tool when a majority of homes were interested in buying all three products, since subscribers could buy all three products in a bundle that cost less than buying them individually. The power of the bundle came from the high cost of breaking the bundle, which made it a challenge for customers to consider alternative broadband providers. However, over time, telephone subscriptions have dropped from 95% to under 20%, and cable TV subscribership has dropped by over half, and is still diving.

While some version of the triple-play bundle still exists, competitors now face two new bundles that are proving to be effective in the market. Both bundles include cellphones as part of the package. FWA sales have been phenomenal. In the third quarter, the three major FWA carriers had almost 14.3 million FWA customers and added over 1 million net new customers, the highest quarterly gain yet.

The three FWA cellular broadband providers have been phenomenally successful in selling home broadband delivered using cellular spectrum. The main selling point is the lower price of FWA broadband, which is priced lower than cable company and fiber broadband. The base price for AT&T is $65; for T-Mobile, it’s $55 – 65, and for Verizon, it’s $60 to $70.

But the base FWA price is not the story, at least for T-Mobile and Verizon. Both companies reduce the broadband price by $15 for bundling with a cellphone plan. Both also offer discounts for customers who use autopay billing. The bundle reduces the price for broadband for both T-Mobile and Verizon FWA to $35 to $45 per month, which explains why the product is selling so well.

The other cellular bundle comes from the biggest cable companies, with Comcast and Charter leading the way. Both cable companies have been aggressively selling cellphone service to existing broadband customers. The primary motivation for the cellphone bundle is to reduce churn by keeping broadband customers from leaving for a competitor.

Charter sells several cellular options. The base cellular package is $20 per month, which includes 1 GB of data, with extra data at $5 per GB. The $30 plan comes with 30 GB of data. The $40 plan comes with 50 GB of data. Comcast also sells by the gigabyte. $15 per month buys 1 GB; $30 per month buys 3 GB, and $60 per month buys 10 GB. But a better option for large data users is the unlimited plans. The $40 Unlimited plan comes with 30 GB of data. Unlimited Plus for $50 comes with 100 GB of data.  All of these plans are often advertised as specials for even less. Charter recently made an offer that a home that will buy and keep for cellphone plans can have free broadband for as long as they keep the phones.

The cellular bundles have been selling well. Consider the national net change in customers for the first two quarters this year for the largest cellular companies:There are a lot of quotes from executives of fiber overbuilders saying that they are not concerned about cable company cellular or FWA. But there is no doubt that these bundles are attracting a lot of customers. These are the two bundles to keep an eye on.

 

Predictions for 2026

The following are my predictions for 2026. I noticed that after I wrote this, the overall tenor of the list is negative. I’m generally pretty upbeat, but I can’t find fault with any of the predictions.

Federal Regulators Will Continue to Ignore Congress. Federal broadband regulators will continue to ignore Congressional legislation. This past year, the FCC ignored a Congressional edict to lower inmate calling rates. NTIA is ignoring Congress by withholding grant funding for the Digital Equity Act, and is likely to provide little or no funding for BEAD non-deployment funds. Expect similar actions in 2026.

Further Erosion of BEAD. NTIA is not done trying to whittle down the size of BEAD grant funding. The agency already whacked funding with the Benefit of the Bargain rule changes, along with numerous other actions. I expect NTIA to pull more rabbits out of the hat and find more excuses to deny funding to some states for issues like net neutrality, state permitting rules, or state regulation of AI.

Major Spectrum Battles. Congress instructed the FCC to find 800 megahertz of mid-range spectrum for auction. That means potentially reclaiming CBRS spectrum used for rural broadband and 6 GHz spectrum that is just starting to be implemented for WiFi 7. Cellular lobbyists preempted the normal deliberations on spectrum management and got the biggest item on their wish list included in the Big Beautiful Bill. I don’t expect opponents of the spectrum grab to go down without a big fight.

FWA Will Have Another Strong Year. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon just had the biggest quarterly gain of new customers yet, adding over 1 million net new FWA customers in the third quarter of 2025. I predict the three companies will continue to add over 900,000 customers per quarter in 2026, and even more if we see a softening of the economy.

Universal Service Fund Reform Will Stall. Congress is considering badly needed changes to the Universal Service Fund. In the current political chaos in Congress, I predict that a USF bill will never make it through the legislative process.   

Big ISPs Will Have Record Cash Windfalls. There hasn’t been a lot of industry press about the bonus depreciation change included in the Big Beautiful Bill. This allows ISPs to quickly write off current fiber construction, which will cut tax liabilities and generate big cash bonuses for the biggest ISPs in 2026. I predict much of the windfall will be used to buy back stock rather than invest in new networks.

Big ISPs Will All Raise Rates. You might think that in a weakened economy, where the cost of living is the number one issue with the public, ISPs might hold off on rate increases. But the recent $5 across-the-board rate increase by AT&T for fiber will be the first of many significant rate increases during the coming year.

A Federal Regulator Will Declare that the Rural Broadband Gap has Been Solved. I don’t know if it will be the FCC or NTIA, but I expect one of the federal broadband regulators to declare that the rural broadband gap has been solved because of the many grant programs and because everybody can now buy satellite broadband. Arielle Roth already hinted at this when she said in a speech that the mission of BEAD “is nothing less than to close the digital divide once and for all”.

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.

Broadband Subscribers 3Q 2025

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.

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.

 

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.

Broadband and Rural Real Estate

Over the last decade, I’ve heard from dozens of real estate agents who work in rural America. They universally tell me that it’s gotten exceedingly hard to sell rural homes that don’t have good broadband.

I’ve also written a few blogs over the years about people who moved to a rural home and were shocked to find they couldn’t buy broadband. They probably moved from a place where broadband is ubiquitously available, and they never imagined that there were places without broadband. The most famous such story in my neck of the woods involves Brian Rathbone, who owns the broadband consulting company Broadband Catalyst. When he found his new home didn’t have fiber, he undertook nearly a decade-long effort to get it, including building the fiber to reach from the road to his remote home.

The Brattle Group released a study late last year that concluded that bringing fiber to a home might add as much as 14% to the value of the home. They undertook the study by comparing the prices for homes in 2023 that didn’t have fiber to prices in the same neighborhoods in 2024 after getting fiber. This was a time period with some significant inflation, so the increase can’t be attributed entirely to fiber, but there is no doubt that getting fiber added significant value to homes. Over the last decade, I recall estimates made by others that estimated the increase in home value for getting fiber of 6% to 8%.

The value of bringing fiber to a rural home has to be greater than for an urban home. How do you quantify the value of adding fiber to a rural home if it suddenly makes the home marketable? In my mind, a house that is put up for sale and gets no offers can be said to have no value. Some rural real estate agents have told me stories of homes without broadband that sat vacant for years after the owners left the home for some reason.

Of course, fiber isn’t the only form of rural broadband. When real estate agents talk about homes without broadband, they include homes served by rural DSL, cellular hotspots, or high orbit satellite broadband. In rural areas, I’ve run across numerous residents who tried and abandoned each of these options as inadequate and not worth the cost.

The rural broadband landscape has gotten more complicated in recent years. For example, most counties now have a few cell towers that provide FWA home cellular broadband. But the coverage areas for decent broadband from towers are small, perhaps two miles, and in the counties I’ve examined, FWA typically covers 20% or less of the area.

WISPs have been stepping up their game in many markets with new radios and better backhaul. It wasn’t unusual three or four years ago to find counties where all WISP customers saw speeds of 10 Mbps or slower. WISPs are often now delivering much faster speeds in these same places.

The big wildcard is Starlink. There are rural customers who rave about it, particularly those for whom Starlink brought the first really workable broadband. But I’ve talked to Starlink customers who complain that the quality of broadband varies throughout the day, making it a challenge to work from home. Many people moving from a cable company or fiber connection are likely to be skeptical of satellite broadband.

Of course, the advantages of bringing better broadband to rural homes go far beyond just the value added to the real estate. The counties I know that have worked hard to get better broadband have several other major goals. They understand the boost to the local economy when rural folks can make good incomes working from home. Counties are universally desperate to keep young residents from leaving the County to find jobs, and they hope that better broadband opens up local opportunities. Good broadband is also key to attracting retirees to move from cities. It’s nearly impossible to put a dollar value on these benefits.

Cellular Upload Speeds

T-Mobile recently announced a cellular speed test where the company was able to achieve an upload speed of 550 Mbps on a live cellular link. The test was clearly done in ideal conditions in order to achieve the fast speed, but T-Mobile acknowledges that upload speeds are increasingly important to customers. Fierce Network quoted T-Mobile President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson as saying, “uplink is the next big thing.”

This is something the broadband industry has known for many years. Fiber companies set a standard of symmetrical download and upload speeds, which frankly provide more upload speed than people need. But the public complained loudly about the slow upload speeds from cable companies during the pandemic, and cable companies have scrambled to increase upload speeds using mid-split upgrades. Cable companies have upgraded many markets to upload speeds of 100 to 200 Mbps.

This new speed test record seems to have been released to complement T-Mobile’s press release in April, where it announced that it now offers the first nationwide 5G Advanced network. By that, T-Mobile means its 5G network has begun to incorporate the latest industry 5G standards included in 3 GPP Release 17 and 18. According to the press release, T-Mobile has implemented 5G Advanced nationwide, although there is some discussion in the Fierce Network article saying that is not likely.

There is no doubt that T-Mobile has upgraded networks to a greater degree than the competition, as documented in the latest report from Ookla for the end of 2024 where T-Mobile had a median download speed of 281.5 Mbps, compared to 199.1 Mbps for Verizon and 140.1 for AT&T.  However, during that same period, T-Mobile’s median upload speed, as measured by Ookla, was much slower at 21.3 Mbps. In the April press release, T-Mobile said its typical upload speeds are between 6 and 31 Mbps.

Upload speeds likely matter a lot more to T-Mobile now that it has passed the 6 million customer mark with its FWA home broadband product. Folks who use broadband for gaming, working from home, online schooling, and conferencing are not going to be enamored with a broadband product where poor upload speeds can degrade performance. The current median speed of 21 Mbps is basically the same as the speed customers don’t like on cable company networks.

Upload speeds are probably the biggest long-term weakness of FWA broadband. FWA customers who live in rural areas might not have another alternative other than Starlink, which also has slow upload speeds. But a lot of FWA’s growth is coming from suburbs and cities where customers have a broadband alternative. Cable companies are scrambling to get much faster upload speeds, and fiber generally has symmetrical speeds. Ookla points out in its latest quarterly report that upload usage is growing at a much faster pace than download usage. T-Mobile is being smart in looking at a way to improve upload speeds.

Broadband Trajectories

For most the dozen years I’ve been writing this blog, the biggest cable companies accounted for almost all of the growth in broadband customers. Quarter after quarter, and year after year, the big cable companies were the source of almost all new net broadband customers.

This started to shift a few years ago when FWA cellular home broadband from T-Mobile, Verizon, and more recently, AT&T entered the scene. For the last couple of years, almost all of the net broadband growth in the country came from the FWA technology and these three carriers.

It’s clear that we’re now entering a new stage the industry where cable broadband losses are accelerating, where FWA growth hasn’t slowed, and where the big telcos are growing again because of their expansion of fiber.

Consider the following statistics that show the net change in broadband customers over the last year, and for the latest quarter, for the largest cable companies, largest telcos, and FWA carriers. There are a few big companies missing from this comparison like Cox, Mediacom, and Windstream, since those companies are privately held and don’t publicly report customer counts.

These numbers show that telcos other than Lumen are growing again. The numbers for telcos don’t tell the whole story because net customer changes in the table include both DSL losses and fiber gains. For example, during the last year, AT&T added over 1 million customers to fiber.

These trajectories don’t bode well for the big cable companies. There were a lot of predictions made last year that FWA growth would slow down, and that doesn’t seem to be the case yet in 2025. The telcos are all picking up steam in terms of adding fiber customers. It’s going to be interesting over the coming years to see how the biggest cable companies fare in battling everybody else. Charter has decided to fight the trend through the merger with Cox. We’ll have to wait and see what the rest have in mind.