Tag Archives: FWA

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.

Comcast’s Woes

On the recent Comcast quarterly earnings call, the company’s President, Mike Cavanagh, admitted the company is having problems and said that Comcast isn’t ‘winning in the marketplace”. There are probably not a lot of people who will read this blog and shed a tear for Comcast. For much of the last decade, Comcast, along with Charter, thrived by taking customers away from telephone companies.

Comcast lost 199,000 net broadband customers in the first quarter. The losses may not seem significant for a company with 31.6 million customers, but if this quarterly loss is sustained the company will drop 2.5% of broadband customers for the year.

It’s obvious that both fiber overbuilders and FWA wireless are taking customers from Comcast. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon added 913,000 new FWA customers in the first quarter of 2025 and haven’t slowed down on customer acquisition as some have predicted. It’s a little harder to quantify the additions to fiber in the quarter since dozens of companies are building fiber to compete with the big cable companies in various markets. But everything I hear says that in every new market where fiber appears, the fiber ISP is snagging a quick 30% to 40% market share.

Cavanaugh says there is a disconnect between the strength of the Comcast networks and the inability to win or keep customers. The company has concluded that the two primary causes for their problems are price transparency and predictability.

It’s clear that Comcast has been counting on having better broadband speeds as a lure to attract and retain customers. The company has been working to increase upload speeds in the current DOCSIS 3.1 networks, and the company announced in September 2024 that it was ready to go full bore on upgrading to DOCSIS 4.0, which will bring multi-gigabit upload and download speeds.

But that doesn’t seem to be impressing customers in the way the company hoped. I’m not sure what Comcast means by price transparency, but it’s clear to customers that Comcast has been the most expensive of the large ISPs. The company’s published list prices for 300 Mbps or faster broadband all pushed or exceeded $100 per month after counting the $15 monthly fee for a WiFi modem. Comcast list prices are far higher than FWA, priced at $55-$65 and also significantly above what most fiber ISPs charge.

It’s not hard to understand price predictability. Customers paying full prices for Comcast broadband have surely been dismayed to see the company continually lowering promotional prices as the company has tried to be more competitive. It seems like Comcast prices have been different every time I checked them in the last year.

It looks like Comcast is going to bite the price bullet. On the earnings call the company announced new pricing of 400 Mbps for $55 per month that includes the WiFi modem and is guaranteed for five years. The new price won’t require a customer contract. Comcast is also throwing in one line of cellular for free for a year.

This is going to be a drastic change for the company. In the third quarter of 2024, the company’s ARPU was $73.78 per customer per month, and these new prices will knock that lower. It’s going to be a grand experiment to see if guaranteed low prices can turn the corner for the company. I have to imagine millions of existing customers are going to ask for that price, and it’s going to be hard to say no to them.

Lower prices will not change the fact that urban broadband is growing increasingly competitive. Comcast thrived for years by charging high prices in noncompetitive markets to offset lower prices in competitive ones. But noncompetitive markets are becoming a thing of the past.

Comcast did have one piece of good news in the first quarter. The company added 345,000 new cellular customers. That puts them on par with the other big carriers. T-Mobile added 495,000; AT&T added 324,000; Charter added 514,000; and Verizon added 94,000.

A Spectrum Crisis?

CTIA, the trade association for cellular companies published a recent blog titled, “The Looming Spectrum Crisis”.  The blog quotes a study from Accenture that concludes that a lack of spectrum for 5G is reaching a point of crisis. The Accenture study says that cellular networks will be unable to meet nearly one-fourth of peak-period requests for connection as soon as 2027.

My first reaction to this headline was, “Here we go again”, because this feels like the giant industry drama eight years ago when the wireless industry told everybody who would listen that the U.S. was losing the 5G war to China. That effort was also aimed at getting more spectrum to support 5G. In retrospect, it turned out that nobody cares what China does with wireless inside their own country.

The other original promise was that 5G was going to revolutionize connectivity. Cell sites were going to be upgraded so that customers could get huge amounts of bandwidth by combining signals from multiple small cell sites that were going to be on every corner. 5G was going to unleash self-driving cars, virtual reality, and even the ability for doctors to do remote operations. It turns out that none of those things were ever implemented because cell carriers quickly realized that people weren’t willing to pay extra for a faster cell signal or for the bells and whistles.

However, the scare tactics worked, and the carriers got the new spectrum. The public didn’t get the bells and whistles, but we got faster cellular networks that work better, and that’s okay.

The CTIA blog seems to be rehashing the same old claims. The blog says that without new spectrum, consumers won’t have access to next-generation products and services like remote robotics, extended reality devices, and autonomous vehicles. Lack of spectrum also means that AI will be stifled.

The biggest threatened consequence of not getting more spectrum is that competition will suffer. By that, CTIA means that the carriers want more spectrum to expand 5G FWA home broadband. That’s interesting because the CEOs of the cellular carriers have all publicly been saying that 5G home broadband is a sideline and was implemented to use up excess capacity in the network. This is the first time I can recall seeing FWA as the justification for needing more spectrum. I can understand why the carriers want more FWA – they had grown the business in only a few years to over 11.6 million customers at the end of 2024. However, wanting more spectrum to sell more FWA customers is not a looming crisis.

It is true that cellular traffic usage has been growing rapidly and likely will continue to do so. Ericsson says the rate of growth of cell phone data usage in North America will be 16% per year through 2030. That prediction must be tempered by the fact that OpenSignal says that 85% of cell phone traffic is now handled by WiFi and not with cellular spectrum.

I guess the wireless industry saw that crying wolf worked eight years ago, and are adopting the same tactic again. The industry clearly needs more spectrum in the future, but it’s not particularly believable that cell networks will be unable to complete huge numbers of connection requests only a year and a half from now.

If the industry is really going to run out of 5G spectrum by 2027, you would think there would have been a much louder stink about this before the second quarter of 2025. You also might think that an industry that was facing that kind of crisis wouldn’t have connected 11.6 million FWA home broadband customers to scarce 5G spectrum in the last few years – particularly since the average FWA customer uses up to 100 times more cellular data in a month than the average cell customer. I am sure that the real purpose of this kind of headline is to give cover for the FCC to give more spectrum. But it’s so damned dramatic.

Comcast and Charter Stocks Drop

The stock market punished Charter and Charter last week after the two companies reported small customer losses in the fourth quarter of 2024.

First the facts. Charter reported a loss of 177,000 broadband customers. With a customer base of almost 30.1 million customers at the end of 3Q 2024, that’s a 0.59% loss of customers – just over one-half of one percent. The stock market reacted by dropping Charter stock from $361.22 to $326.78 – a drop of 10%.

Comcast reported a loss of 139,000 broadband customers. With a customer base of over 31.8 million customers at the end of 3Q 2024, that’s a 0.44% loss of customers – less than one-half of one percent. The stock market reacted by dropping Comcast stock from $37.54 to $32.58 – a drop of 13%.

On the surface, this seems like an extreme overreaction to small losses. Textbook stock valuations would not concentrate on something like the customer counts but on overall earnings. Consider Charter, which released its fourth-quarter earnings. While the company lost 177,000 broadband customers, Charter also:

  • Added 529,000 cellular customers in 4Q 2024.
  • Fourth-quarter revenues are up 1.6% over the previous year.
  • Fourth-quarter EBITDA was up 3.4% from the previous year.
  • Charter bought back $1.3 billion of its shares, which is supposed to increase stock value.
  • On the bad news side, Charter lost 1.23 million cable TV customers during 2024, a trend that has been happening for years. That’s a little higher than the 1 million cable customers lost in 2023.

Comcast results are similar for the fourth quarter. In addition to losing 139,000 broadband customers,

  • Comcast added 307,000 cellular customers in 4Q 2024.
  • Fourth-quarter revenues are up 0.2% over the previous year.
  • Fourth-quarter EBITDA was up 3.5% from the previous year.
  • On the bad news side, Comcast lost 1.58 million cable TV customers during 2024. That’s an improvement over the 2 million cable customers lost in 2023.

Perhaps the drops are recognition of the long-term trajectories for cable companies. Both companies told investors in 2024 that they had weathered the storm to offset losses due to FWA wireless. However, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon had another great quarter and added 960,000 FWA customers.

Cable companies are also seeing increased competition from fiber overbuilding. RWA LLC recently issued a report that fiber overbuilders passed 10.3 million total homes for the year ended September 30, 2024. Over 9% of that new fiber is being built by cable companies. RVA says that in neighborhoods where fiber has been in place for several years, cable companies lose an average of 33% of their customers.

It’s actually amazing that the cable companies have maintained customers over last year while fending off FWA and fiber overbuilding. The fact that customer losses are small is a success story. However, there is a darker side to the story – they’ve kept customers by cutting prices. While Charter and Comcast both had broadband rate increases in 2024, both have been keeping customers by lowering rates.

It’s likely that the size of the stock price drops were exaggerated due to the craziness that happens in markets in times of economic uncertainty. These are not the only companies getting punished in the stock market. But maybe this is an overdue adjustment due to changes in the underlying fundamentals of the businesses.

My Predictions for 2025

Disruption of Federal Grants. It seems almost inevitable that Congress is going to pull back some or all future funding for the Digital Equity Grants that are part of the BEAD program. Some in Congress are already warning the NTIA not to award the current grants that are under review.

The BEAD grant program will change. Congress is likely to reverse some of the BEAD provisions that Senators have been complaining about, like the BEAD requirement that requires a low-rate option. However, BEAD is ultimately designed to be a state grant program, and a lot of States are going to fight hard against trying to direct funds away from fiber. With that said, it’s likely that a lot more BEAD funding will go to satellite than earlier estimates. I predict that the change of administration and a swap out of folks at NTIA is going to result in at least a six month delay in the grant process.

The FCC Will Stay the Course. The new FCC will not change the agency as much as you might expect from a change in administration. New Chairman Carr will act quickly to reverse the current FCC rulings on net neutrality and discrimination. But otherwise, there won’t be a lot of revisiting of other recent decisions. Assuming that Chairman Carr will tackle what he addressed in Project 2025, the FCC will spend a lot of energy trying to free up new 5G spectrum and investigating issues associated with Section 230 and content moderation.

Job Well Done? I predict at some point that the FCC and/or the NTIA will declare at some point this year that the rural broadband problem has largely been solved, relieving the federal government of any obligation to fund any more broadband infrastructure.

FWA Will have Another Strong Year. Some industry analysts have written off FWA cellular broadband as a temporary flash in the pan. I predict that T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T will continue to collectively add 900,000+ customers per quarter again this year. Any increased inflation in the economy will drive the FWA numbers even higher.

Universal Service Fund Will Change. I predict that the Supreme Court is going to rule that Congress erred when it gave the FCC the authority to operate the USF and to establish fees to fund it. That’s going to force Congress to scramble to revamp the popular program. Congress will be forced to fix the funding issues. I predict Congress will create a tax that will be charged against a larger base that includes large users of the Internet like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others. All of the changes to USF will probably mean that the launch of the $9 billion 5G Fund for Rural America will be delayed or shelved for the year.

The Mad Scramble to Buy Fiber Businesses Will Continue. There is still a glut of investment capital looking for a place to land, and a lot of that money is going to be aimed at buying existing fiber-based ISPs.

RDOF Troubles. I don’t think we’re done with RDOF defaults. This might be further exacerbated by any movement by the administration to claw back RDOF funding that hasn’t resulted in infrastructure.

Cable Companies Will Tame Their Losses. While large cable companies will continue to collectively lose customers, the rate of losses will slow as the companies focus on holding their market share. The large cable companies collectively lost 265,000 customers in the third quarter of this year. However, Comcast and Charter both said they would have had small gains except for the one-time losses due to the end of ACP.

Are Light Poles Telecom Infrastructure?

A long-running issue resurfaced recently asking if light poles should be made available for telecommunications. This idea that light poles might be telecom infrastructure comes from language included in Section 224 of the FCC’s code that says that a “utility shall provide a cable television system or any telecommunications carrier with nondiscriminatory access to any pole, duct, conduit, or right-of-way owned or controlled by it.”

The question was raised again recently when AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and the CTIA, the lobbying group for the cellular industry, asked the FCC to consider the issue. These companies are interested in using light poles to mount electronics and radios to support cellular service and FWA home broadband.

It’s an interesting question. It boils down to the question if telecommunications carriers have the right to use a pole that is used only for lighting and nothing else. The FCC’s rules have been clear for years that poles used for telephone, cable, or other wires are subject to the FCC rules. However, cities and utilities have resisted making light-only poles available.

This same question surfaced a few years back in the early days of the 5G craze when cellular carriers pledged they would beef up cellular networks everywhere by putting small cell sites on poles. This never materialized in most cities, and the majority of small cell sites have been deployed to serve high-rise buildings, often mounted on the roof and aimed downward through the building.

I suspect the resurfacing of this issue is due to the unprecedented success of FWA cellular broadband. The three big carriers now have grown to 9.7 million customers nationwide after having just launched the new broadband product in 2021. The three big cellular companies added 933,000 new FWA customers in the second quarter of this year.

The renewed interest in getting onto light poles is an indicator that the companies are exploring the idea of returning to the small-cell model for FWA wireless. Verizon launched a trial of this technology in parts of Sacramento and a few other cities a few years ago but is now concentrating on serving FWA from big cellular tower sites. Verizon also recently announced a successful trial of connecting people with FWA in downtown high rises from radios placed on top of nearby buildings.

The request for placing radios on light poles makes a lot of sense in this context. Urban utility poles are notoriously already overloaded with wires and often don’t have room to add a radio system. Pole owners don’t like having electronics on poles since it adds to the complexity and creates safety issues for technicians that work on poles, particularly after bad weather events when repairs have to be made. Light poles would be virgin real estate for wireless carriers since they know they would be the only one on the poles.

There are several issues with mounting radios on light poles. In many communities where other utilities are buried, light poles are often designed as an esthetic enhancement and are not traditional wooden poles. Cities with aesthetically pleasing light poles are going to strongly resist hanging electronics. These cities probably already forced other utilities underground to enhance the livability of neighborhoods. Light poles were often also not designed to bear the extra weight and wind stress that might come from mounting additional structures on the poles.

It will be interesting to see if the FCC takes up the issue. They have considered it before and never opted to bring light poles under their jurisdiction. I have to imagine there would be a court battle if the agency ordered it.

Massive MIMO

Nokia recently announced that it is introducing radios that will increase both the capabilities and performance of FWA cellular broadband. The technology that probably will have the most impact on wireless performance is the use of MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) antenna arrays.

Nokia recently announced that it will be deploying Massive-MIMO antennas that will allow for 16 layers of data transmission, up from 4 layers deployed in today’s cellular antennas. The term massive just refers to the number of antennas used in the process. Nokia first demonstrated a massive MIMO transmitter in 2017 that used 128 antennas, with 64 for receive and 64 for transmit.

Massive MIMO can be used in two different ways. First, multiple transmitter antennas can be focused together to reach a single customer (who also needs to have multiple receivers) to increase throughput. This is how Verizon or T-Mobile will be able to increase broadband speeds to gigabit or even faster levels – by making multiple connections of 100 Mbps channels. Combining channels like this requires sophisticated electronics in both the towers on radios and in the receivers. A current FWA customer that might max out at 300 Mbps speeds would likely need a new receiver to achieve much faster speeds.

Bandwidth to customers is also boosted by what’s called precoding or beamforming. It’s easiest to think of beamforming as creating a beam aimed at a specific customer – but the technology is more complicated than that. Beamforming coordinates the signals from multiple MIMO transmitters to maximize the received signal gain and to minimize what is called the multipath fading effect. In simple terms, beamforming technology sets the power level and gain for each separate antenna to maximize the data throughput. Every frequency and channel operates a little differently, and beamforming favors the channels and frequencies with the best operating capabilities in a given environment and instance. Beamforming allows for the cellular signal to be concentrated in a portion of the receiving area – which is the ‘beam’. This is not the same kind of highly concentrated beam that is used in microwave radios that transmit a pencil-wide beam between two locations.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of Massive-MIMO and beamforming is allowing a tower to connect to more customers at the same time. The original specification called for a 5G tower to be able to connect with 100,000 simultaneous connections. This current upgrade doesn’t come anywhere close to reaching that goal, but by creating zones within a sector using beamforming, a carrier gets to use the spectrum multiple simultaneous times with different ‘beams”.

These coming improvements are going to mean better performance for FWA. T-Mobile, Verizon, and now AT&T are outperforming the rest of the industry with FWA. When technology improves speed and performance, FWA is likely to be even more disruptive than today. I’m still of the opinion that a landline signal is going to be more reliable than a wireless connection – but cable companies and fiber ISPs are going to have to lower prices to compete with FWA. Good news for consumers – bad news for stock prices.

T-Mobile Pursues Fiber

In one of the more interesting fiber transactions of recent years,  T-Mobile announced the acquisition of Metronet, a fiber overbuilder. Metronet is currently owned by Oak Hill Capital, the Cinelli family who founded the company, and KKR, a minority investor. Metronet has been one of the fastest growing fiber overbuilders and has grown to a reported 2 million fiber passings. Metronet has been an aggressive overbuilder and also picked up customers in the 2022 merger with Vexus, an overbuilder from Texas.

T-Mobile will use a mix of debt and equity to invest $4.9 billion to acquire a 50% stake in the business. Subject to regulatory approval of the deal, T-Mobile will take over the customers and the operations of the business. Metronet will focus on expansion plans, network engineering, network deployment, and customer installations.

This acquisition follows T-Mobile’s acquisition of Lumos announced in April. That acquisition brought 320,000 customers and 7,500 route miles of fiber to T-Mobile in the mid-Atlantic area.

T-Mobile expects the acquired companies to be self-supporting, including funding the expansion of fiber. Metronet has announced plans to grow to 6.5 million fiber passings by 2030.

This is an interesting transaction because it represents a major foray into the wireline business by a traditional wireless company. T-Mobile has already been the fastest growing ISP over the last few years as it added almost 5.2 million customers to its FWA cellular wireless product over a few year span. The two fiber overbuilders plus the FWA business will make T-Mobile the fifth largest ISP in the country behind Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon.

Metronet advertises itself as an affordable alternative to cable company broadband. It’s prices, disregarding introductory specials, offer 100 Mbps for $40 or a gigabit for $60. But Metronet has one of the more unusual hidden fees in the industry, and every broadband product requires a mandatory $13 month additional fee it calls Tech Assurance, which is essentially insurance and “covers any service calls or repairs to all Metronet-owned equipment”.

I’ve written several blogs lately that have speculated that the broadband business is reaching full market penetration, in that households that can afford broadband mostly seem to now have it. That doesn’t mean the industry can’t grow, and companies like Metronet and now T-Mobile believe there is a lot of room to capture customers from the big cable companies. As much as you might hear about how fiber has captured the market, Comcast and Charter still have over half of all broadband customers in the country.

Another interesting dynamic is T-Mobile will offer both fiber and FWA wireless broadband in its acquired markets, meaning it has two alternatives for customers. It might seem like the company is competing against itself, but it’s instead offering two alternatives to win customers from cable companies and other ISPs.

This acquisition also raises the interesting question of whether T-Mobile is done with expansion. A recent op-ed in FierceNetworks speculated that there are some other interesting acquisition targets in the market, including Quantum Fiber (CenturyLink fiber), Ziply, Zayo, and Astound. I haven’t the slightest idea if any of these companies are in play, but any time there is a major acquisition, the speculation game of musical chairs always begins.

Competing Against FWA

At the end of the first quarter of this year, T-Mobile and Verizon together have accumulated 8.6 million customers nationwide on FWA cellular home broadband. This is amazing success for a product that was just launched in 2021. The combined FWA customers represent 7% of the entire U.S. broadband market, and if FWA was a single ISP it would be the fourth largest ISP in the country behind Comcast, Charter, and AT&T.

Nobody knows exactly where the companies are finding the new customers because they aren’t telling, and the companies losing customers are mum about it. The FWA technology isn’t everywhere, and T-Mobile claims to cover over 50 million households with the technology, and Verizon 40 million. The appeal of FWA is obvious. The companies offer broadband between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps in in most markets with prices from $50 to $70 depending on bundling with a cellphone and agreeing to use autopay. The two carriers have also selectively been paying customers to break contracts with other ISPs.

It’s obvious in looking at the claimed coverage of FWA in the FCC broadband maps that a lot of FWA coverage is in rural areas where there aren’t a lot of broadband alternatives. The two carriers are likely snagging customers from DSL, fixed wireless ISPs, and satellite companies, as well as migrating their own rural hotspot customers to the much-improved broadband. However, FWA also covers a lot of towns, suburbs and cities. In these markets, the FWA carriers are touting low prices and faster speeds to lure customers who stayed with telephone company DSL to save money. With low prices, FWA is also clearly targeting cable companies.

It’s been interesting to watch how competitors have been dealing with FWA. In an article in FierceNetwork, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts characterized FWA by saying “Three companies are all simultaneously within a short period of time are all offering a home connectivity product by their own admission a lower speed, more easily congested network.” Comcast is reacting to FWA by advertising the differences between the products. The company has also launched its NOW line of products. This starts with broadband priced at 100 Mbps for $30 or 200 Mbps for $45.

Charter’s CFO Jessica Fischer characterized FWA technology as “lower quality but also lower cost.” She went on to say that FWA will not be able to keep up with increased household demand in future years. Fischer characterized the impact of FWA as “temporary.”

Cox Communication has been advertising against FWA since the end of 2022. In it’s first ads the company said that “FWA is just phone Internet, not home Internet” and isn’t as fast or reliable as Cox’s cable Internet service. The ads went on to warn the public not to “put a cell tower in charge of your home Internet connection.”

Frontier’s Executive Chairman of the Board was quoted at a J.P. Morgan conference as saying that FWA is having almost no impact on Frontier’s fiber business, which is believable since Frontier offers symmetrical 500 Mbps broadband for a standard rate of $64.99, with an introductory rate of $44.99. But Frontier hasn’t been saying anything about the impact of FWA on its DSL service, which is an obvious target for FWA where Frontier has not yet converted to fiber.

It’s an interesting set of reactions. Only Comcast is trying to openly compete with price. It’s likely that the others are quietly offering price deals to keep customers. However, lowering prices has a downside by lowering average revenue per customer – a key financial metric for the industry. ISPs have to decide which is worse – losing customers or lowering prices.

The primary thing that FWA has done to the industry is to shake up the price point for broadband. The big cable companies have all increased list prices annually over the last decade to goose prices to $90 and more. Charter just announced another $3 rate increase across the board. However, a shrinking number of cable customers are paying the list price for broadband.

The cable companies all warn about the ability of FWA technology to serve a lot of customers. The cable companies seem to believe (or at least want the public to believe) that many people will try FWA and not like the broadband experience. The cellular carriers have enough capacity to have gained 7% of the U.S. market in an incredibly short time, and only time will tell if the cell carriers can hang on to these customers over the long haul.

Is Cellular Quality Getting Worse?

Over the last several months I’ve had conversations with a half dozen people who tell me they believe that cellular network quality is deteriorating. The evidence they have been using is an increase in dropped calls, the occasional ability to not get a ring tone , and a decrease in voice quality during calls. I know these observations are subjective, and if I only heard this from one or two people I wouldn’t be writing this blog. But I have to also include myself in the list of those who have noticed a change.

This happened once before. It was very clear before the big carriers introduced the 5G spectrum upgrades that the 4G network was getting badly overloaded. I can remember being on calls where I could barely hear people at the other end. I remember having dropped calls several times per week.

But the network problems went away within a relatively short period of time after the introduction of 5G spectrum that also coincided with some general upgrades to the overall cellular networks. This makes a lot of sense, because the introduction of the new spectrum means that carriers were able to spread existing traffic over two networks instead of just one. Anybody using the 5G network after they were introduced got great service at first because the networks were relatively empty. 4G networks also improved as the traffic decreased.

Call quality also got noticeably better. We can’t know exactly what improved voice quality. It could have been from spreading voice calls across two networks. It also might have been due to new voice technologies. For example, the major carriers implanted Voice over LTE (VoLTE) which introduced techniques to improve the quality of audio signals. This technology is automatic for phones that are certified by the carriers to use the technology.

There are several reasons why cellular calling might be deteriorating. First is the overall continued increase in cellular data traffic that puts more stress on cell sites every year. I’ve not been able to find specific statistics for the overall increase in cellular traffic volumes nationwide, but I’ve seen folks who have speculated that it’s north of 20% per year. You don’t have to be a network engineer to do enough simple math to see that compounded 20% growth can put major stress on all components of a network after only three or four years. It was this growth of traffic that drove the carriers to rush implementation of 5G networks. There were markets before the 5G upgrades that were getting close to collapsing.

Another reason that quality might be deteriorating is that carriers decided not to implement small cells in the way they were promising five years ago. They claimed there would be a small cell site in every neighborhood by now, and the reality is that the vast majority of the small cells never got built. Carriers looked at the capital cost and decided it was too expensive except in the most densely populated places.

The final reason might be FWA cellular broadband. The big cell carriers have added over 7 million broadband customers to cell sites. This is mostly home broadband, and ISPs all understand how the broadband demand from households has continued to grow. According to OpenVault, the average home in 2019 used 218 gigabytes of data per month, and that ballooned by 561 gigabytes in 2023. Cell sites were not designed to provide the steady streaming used for home broadband uses like connecting to schools and offices, gaming, and non-stop video streaming.

The carriers acknowledge that FWA traffic can impair normal cellular traffic and the FWA product comes with the warning that the carriers might throttle traffic any time that cell traffic gets too heavy. But now that the carriers have added million of customers to FWA, I have to wonder how willing they are to cut FWA broadband speeds? All the ISPs I know tell me that the public has grown exceedingly intolerant of slowdown or lapses in broadband, and I have to wonder how many homes will keep FWA if they get throttled too often. Deterioration of cellular performance might be due to a reluctance to throttle FWA broadband customers.

All of this is conjecture and based upon purely subjective evidence from folks I know. But these are all industry folks who are good at noticing this sort of thing, and I have more problems with cell calls than I did a year ago. I speculate that cellular network deterioration would be local problem and not global, so it might matter where you live. I’m curious about the experience of readers.