Tag Archives: Verizon

A Converged Carrier Market?

T-Mobile made financial news recently when a KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst downgraded the long-term outlook for T-Mobile stock and said the company is “underweight”. Press coverage quoted the analyst saying, “We think [T-Mobile] is fiber deficient in a converged/bundled world”.

We’ve been headed towards the industry that is dominated by a handful of converged telecom providers, and the comments from this analyst show that day is probably here. The analyst’s comments come from comparing T-Mobile with the other giant converged companies that offer broadband and wireless, specifically AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter/Cox.

It’s curious why the analyst dinged T-Mobile because the company is profitable and successful. In the latest financial report for the second quarter of 2025, the company reported $17.4 billion in customer revenues, up 6% year-over-year. Net income was $3.2 billion, the highest-ever for the company and up 10% year-over-year. Net cash from operations was $7 billion, up 27% year-over-year. Adjusted free cash flow was $4.6 billion, up 4% year-over-year.

T-Mobile was criticized because the analyst believes that the most successful big companies will be those that lock up customers with a bundle of broadband and wireless. That seems to mean that the companies with the most gigabit passings will be the ultimate winners in the market. T-Mobile is expected to have about 15 million fiber passings by 2030. That pales behind the 50 million passings expected by Verizon by 2020 or the 60 million planned by AT&T by 2023. Charter passes 57 million homes today and will be adding 7 million homes when it closes on the merger with Cox. Comcast says it will have 62.5 million passings by 2023. T-Mobile will clearly have the smallest fiber footprint.

How are the other big four converged companies doing with bundling? Comcast had 8.5 million cellular customers at the end of 2Q 2025 compared to 31.4 million broadband households. Charter had 10.9 million cellular customers compared to 29.9 million broadband households. AT&T reported for 2Q 2025 that 40% of its fiber customers are buying cellular. I can’t find where Verizon highlights the percentage of homes that buy cellular and broadband.

So this year, the stock market doesn’t seem to be valuing the converged carriers evenly. As I wrote this blog, T-Mobile stock was up 19% for the year. Comcast stock is down 11% for the year and Charter is down 22%. Verizon stock is up 6% and AT&T is up 20%. There is a story behind all of the stock price changes, and it mostly involves changes in customers and earnings, not in the percentage of convergence.

One thing is clear. These five companies dominate the telecommunications space. The five companies have most of the cellular customers in the country, and T-Mobile will be adding customers from the USCellular purchase. The five companies had over 98 million broadband customers at the end of the second quarter of 2025, and Charter will be adding 6-7 million more customers if the merger with Cox is approved. The five companies account for almost all of the national net growth of broadband customers.

The KeyBank analyst was looking at the long-term trajectory of T-Mobile compared to the other giant companies. The analysis statement seems to assume that FWA growth will eventually top out and decline in competition with the other big carriers. But for now, in the second quarter, T-Mobile had the biggest growth in both cellular and broadband customers. It’s obvious that T-Mobile has something today that customers value. My crystal ball is not clear enough to be able to predict that T-Mobile is going to stop growing any time soon, and it seems too early to predict that T-Mobile won’t be in the same category as the other four converged companies.

The Human Touch

Recently, Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath wrote to customers saying that Verizon customer service has “taken a different path” and the company is raising the bar on the customer service experience. This sounds a lot like communications with customers I’ve seen over the years from all of the big ISPs – I can think of dozens of company messages telling customers that a big ISP cares about customer service.

What’s different about Mr. Sampath’s email is that he also included an email address where customers can contact him directly if they are having a problem that is not getting resolved. I have to assume this will use a different email address from the one he uses for normal emails, because it seems likely that his inbox will quickly fill with customer complaints.

This reminded me of an experience I had back in the early 1980s when I worked at Southwestern Bell. The company had an executive telephone hotline that was supposedly a direct line to the President for customers who knew the special number. Calls to this number were recorded and landed on the desk of somebody who happened to sit close to me. I would often overhear some of the complaints that came to the executive line, and they were the normal things you would expect – overbilling, botched installations, etc. Employees around the company responded quickly to every referral from the executive hotline.

I have to think that Mr. Sampath is doing something similar and has recreated the executive hotline using an email address. If Verizon customer service is indeed getting better, I assume anybody who makes a valid claim to that email will get some attention from elsewhere in Verizon. If that doesn’t happen, this will quickly be chalked up as another big company public relations ploy rather than an actual aid for frustrated customers.

I have to wonder how well this idea will work with such a gigantic company with coast-to-coast customers. I know at Southwestern Bell that no employee wanted to get the internal message from the executive suite that they had messed up. Will that work for a much bigger company?

People who run smaller ISPs, or other small businesses that deal with the public, will laugh at this article, because fielding customer issues is a daily part of every executive’s work day. It’s something that nobody loves doing, but it comes with operating a business. Every ISP hopes that employees can satisfy every customer so that the top guys never hear about problems. But the folks at Southwestern Bell many years ago figured out that there had to be a way for customers who aren’t satisfied with the routine solution to have an outlet to be heard.

This story has me thinking about how important the human touch is with customers – having a real person to talk to who can solve a problem. That question was prompted for me when I noticed that Verizon is touting that it has incorporated AI into the customer service process. I have to wonder if AI will be used to tackle problems sent to Mr Sampath’s email.

While big companies can pretend otherwise, we have not yet reached the time when an AI can provide the same quality response as a real person. My gut tells me that it will be a huge mistake for the big ISPs and carriers to take the human touch out of customer interactions. If so, that’s good news for the smaller companies that compete with big ISPs. I foresee that small ISP advertising will emphasize that customers can always talk to a real person.

 

What’s Going on With Boost Mobile?

Boost Mobile added 90,000 net new cellular customers in the first quarter of 2025, increasing customers to 7.1 million. That’s a big turnaround from recent quarters with customer losses. Reaching net additions might mean the company is finally turning the corner to become successful.

Boost Mobile was acquired by Dish Networks as a result of the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. One of the FCC requirements was that Sprint would be replaced in the market with a new nationwide carrier, and the FCC took steps to enable Dish to be the new nationwide carrier.

When Dish acquired Boost Mobile for $1.4 billion in 2021, the company had over 9 million customers, but customers slowly leaked away since then. During those years, Dish has been deploying a new 5G SA (standalone) network and now claims to be able to cover 80% of the people in the country from it’s own cell sites. Boost is deploying with open RAN technology, meaning the company isn’t locked into the specific hardware and software from the big cellular vendors.

Boost met its first buildout requirements and was able to reach 70% of the U.S. population by June 2023. However, Boost asked for and received a delay for deploying four spectrum blocks (AWS-4, lower 700 MHz E, 600 MHz, and AWS H) until December 14, 2026 instead of June 14, 2025.

Boost Mobile still has a way to go to activate traffic on its newly built network. Most of its customers are still roaming on AT&T and T-Mobile. In the 4Q 2024 earnings call for parent Echostar, executives from Boost Mobile admitted that only 1 million customers were riding the Boost network.

A recent article from Ookla documents that the Boost Mobile networks are getting faster but are still not up on average to the speeds of T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T. However, speeds are improving, and Boost says it will have the fastest network in some major markets this year. Near the end of last year, Boost was named as the fastest cellular provider in New York City. I have to wonder how much of that speed is due to having a largely empty network?

Boost Mobile has a long way to go to be relevant. At the end of the first quarter of this year, Verizon claimed 146 million customers, T-Mobile 131 million, and AT&T 118 million. Boost is also behind the two big cable companies, with Charter having 10.4 million cellular customers and Comcast 8.2 million.

It’s interesting how customers have not moved to Boost Mobile. The company is offering competitive prices. One would have to think that its networks are relatively empty and nearly pristine. Dish made a public relations blunder when it opened cell sites a few years ago before the open RAN technology was working well. If Boost is now on solid technical footing, there is opportunity for growth. There has been a lot of press and speculation over the last year that T-Mobile and Verizon might be overstressing their networks due to the proliferation of FWA home cellular broadband.

To add to the drama. Echostar, the parent of Boost announced last week that it is electing to miss a $326 million interest payment on its 2029 maturity debt. If the company doesn’t make the payment by the end of June it will be forced into chapter 11 bankruptcy. Echostar may be playing chicken with the FCC and is blaming the default on the FCC not resolving some of the open spectrum issues for the company

One thing is for sure. Assuming it survives, Boost Mobile has a long way to go to be a serious nationwide carrier. The company may never reach the size of Sprint which it is supposedly replacing. It will be interesting to watch if the company can reach solvency and justify the big investment made in the new nationwide network.

Increasing Broadband Price Competition

Competition has been creeping into broadband pricing for the last several years as cable companies have been using low introductory rates to try to win new customers and offering similarly low price to try to keep them. Anybody who competes against the big cable companies will tell you that cable companies have been competing for years by offering two-year promotional prices to keep customers.

However, competition might have gone into a new gear recently when Comcast began offering low rates with a five-year price guarantee. The 5-year guaranteed rates were introduced soon after Verizon offered a 3-year price guarantee for FWA wireless home broadband.

In a Comcast blog dated April 15, Comcast announced a 5-year guaranteed rate plan for new customers for 400 Mbps broadband for $55 per month. The product comes with the company’s WiFi Gateway and no contract is required. The plan also includes a free Comcast cell phone plan with a 30 GB data cap for one year. This is a substantial discount. The list price for 400 Mbps is $86, and the normal charge for the WiFi Gateway is $15. The cell phone normally costs $30 per month. The 5-year rate is available through June 23, but Comcast has already told some news outlets that the special rate offer will probably be extended.

On the announcement date, several news outlets like PC Magazine listed the 5-year deal packages as 400 Mbps ($55), 600 Mbps ($70), 1.1 Gbps ($85), and 2.1 Gbps ($105). The outlets also reported that these rates only come with an auto debit to a bank account. Comcast will charge $8 more to bill to a credit card and $10 more for a paper bill.

The low prices were likely also prompted by the recent announcement that Comcast lost 199,000 broadband customers in the first quarter. In this same quarter, the FWA products from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon gained 913,000 customers.

Comcast’s competition isn’t sitting still. Verizon recently announced a 3-year lock for FWA broadband prices at $35 per month for customers who accept autopay and who also buy a Verizon cell plan. Verizon includes up to a $250 Amazon gift card. Not to be outdone, T-Mobile now offers a $35 price for FWA broadband with a 5-year guarantee for customers who have a T-Mobile cellular plan. The Verizon and T-Mobile plans seem to be more focused on reducing cellular churn than gaining new broadband customers.

Comcast is clearly trying to stop the loss of customers. I have to wonder about the overall impact of such widely advertised special rates. How will these low play with the millions of customers who are paying a lot more, including the many paying $15 per month for a WiFi gateway?

Will this lead to Comcast finally lowering its list prices? The company has raised rates annually for over a decade. Can the company maintain high rates in noncompetitive markets while widely advertising severely discounted prices elsewhere?

I’ve been saying for years that broadband will cost $100 per month. When considering the WiFi gateway, Comcast’s list prices were already there. Comcast isn’t even the most expensive cable company, and a handful of cable companies like Cox, Breezeline, and Mediacom have even higher list prices.

This announcement by Comcast, and the constant advertisements from the FWA providers, could prove to be a watershed moment for prices in the industry. Just imagine the glee that USTelecom will have next year if they can announce that prices for broadband are actually decreasing.

Rural 5G

The FCC voted last year to launch the 5G Fund for Rural America to expand 5G coverage into the many parts of country with poor cell coverage. It may turn out that market forces might mean that some of that subsidy won’t be needed since the big carriers are expanding into rural areas. A recent blog from Ookla documents the rural expansion of 5G. Ookla concludes that fierce nationwide competitive pressure is driving the carriers to look harder at rural areas to gain every possible customer.

Ookla, which collects a huge volume of speed tests, is one of the few companies that can look at carrier expansion using its own data. When Ookla sees multiple speed tests on 5G, it has definitive proof that coverage is present in an area. Ookla looked at the recent rural expansion from each of the three primary carriers.

T-Mobile. Ookla shows that T-Mobile has the largest rural 5G footprint today. T-Mobile claims it covers 323 million people, or 98% of U.S. households with 5G using its low-band 600 MHz spectrum. This low-band spectrum carriers for a greater distance than the spectrum used by other carriers. The company was required to expand coverage to 97% of the population as part of the agreement with the FCC when it purchased Sprint. I have to wonder about the 98% coverage. If you look closely at the FCC cellular maps, T-Mobile shows coverage of very slow speeds over a lot of rural America, and you have to wonder if this coverage is real enough to even use for voice calls.

T-Mobile also is the fastest carrier in much of the country, which came from the deployment of the 2.5 GHz spectrum that the company acquired with the Sprint purchase. The company has used the 150 MHz band of the spectrum to increase speeds in the top 100 markets in the country. We know that T-Mobile has rural plans since the company announced in 2024 that it is hoping to achieve a 20% market share in rural America by the end of 2025. That claim is bolstered by the pending close of the purchase of 30% of the spectrum and all 4.5 million customers of UScellular.

AT&T. A lot of the company’s rural expansion comes from FirstNet. This is a nationally funded program to create a nationwide first responder network. AT&T was awarded $6.5 billion to build the network and also given 20 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum. FirstNet brought AT&T a 25-year contract with the government. There is an expected $2 billion additional investment to upgrade the network to 5G everywhere.

One of the key requirements for FirstNet is that it must be made available to first responders in rural areas. This led AT&T to install FirstNet on all of its own towers and to build over 1,000 rural towers. AT&T announced in October 2024 that it has 6.4 million connections and 29,000 public safety agencies on the network. AT&T has also invested heavily in spectrum auctions and spent $37 billion the FCC’s C-band and 3.45 GHz auctions.

Verizon. Verizon doesn’t own much low-band spectrum that would give it coverage in rural areas. Instead, the company relied on a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) that allows one spectrum band to toggle between 4G LTE and 5G  in 1 millisecond increments. While it works, this didn’t give the company the boost it was hoping for.

Verizon’s rural strategy seems to be through acquisition, and the company has bought cell carriers operating in Kentucky, Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Montana. Verizon is also buying $1 billion of 850 MHz, AWS and PCS spectrum from UScellular.

Verizon is betting on the C-Band spectrum that it purchased in 2021 for $52 billion. It’s hoping that the 161 MHz band of spectrum will carry it into the future. The company has announced it intends to deploy more rural spectrum,

None of the carriers are likely to expand into sparely populated rural areas where coverage is often nonexistent. But the current expansion plans likely will bring cellular relief to a lot of rural areas, long before any solution might come from the FCC.

How Low Can They Go?

AT&T and Verizon continue to aggressively eliminate staff. You have to wonder where the bottom will be in staffing levels.

In September 2024, Verizon announced that it would cut 5,000 positions. As of January 1 of this year, the company had 99,600 employees, down 5,000 from the beginning of 2024. As of January 1 of this year, AT&T had 140,990 employees, down 8,910 people during 2024. At the beginning of 2000, the two companies employed over 475,000 people, and since that time have shed a little over half of their employees.

The following graph shows the employees of the two companies since 2000.Verizon has steadily cut full-time employees during this century. The graph doesn’t show any disruption from Verizon’s purchase of AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017. The graph also doesn’t tell the whole story since Verizon has also outsourced positions during this time. I recall a controversy at the end of 2018 when the company outsourced 2,500 IT jobs to India.

AT&T employee counts are a lot more complicated since AT&T acquired a lot of companies this century, including BellSouth in 2006, Leap Wireless in 2013, DirectTV in 2015, and Time Warner in 2018. AT&T subsequently shed both DirecTV and Tim Warner. Even with the turmoil caused by purchasing and ditching subsidiaries, AT&T has steadily been eliminating staff.

Both companies are currently actively striving to eliminate copper networks, with Verizon is much further along with this effort than AT&T. However, Verizon is slated to merge with Frontier sometime this year, which will bring new employees and a return of a lot of copper networks that Verizon had ditched to Frontier in the past.

Both companies also say they are considering how AI might streamline operations, which probably means even further cuts in staffing over the next few years.

This is all a far cry from the time when AT&T was the telephone monopoly and had over 1 million employees, making it the biggest employer outside the U.S. military. It’s anybody’s guess how much more these companies can slash staff and remain viable.

What Does Unlimited Mean?

It’s always entertaining and informative when the big ISPs fight with each other. One recent battle comes from Verizon filing a complaint with the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Better Business Bureau.

Verizon complained about Charter advertising that touted its cellular service as unlimited. Charter has been marketing both an Unlimited and Unlimited Plus cellular plan, and the advertisement for these plans implies that customers can use as much voice, data and texts as they want. The very name Unlimited implies to the average customer that there is no cap on usage.

As you would expect, this isn’t exactly true, and none of the cellular carriers, including Verizon, has a truly unlimited cellular data plan. In Charter’s case, data speeds are severely restricted once a customer reaches a monthly cap. There are also other limitations on data usage, such as the amount that can be used for tethering during a month.

The dispute went to NAD since the big carriers have all agreed to use NAD as the arbiter of disputes about advertising claims. This saves the carriers from taking each other to court, and the carriers all accept decisions made by NAD.

Interestingly, NAD decided that the Charter plans are unlimited since customers never get cut off entirely from using data. However, NAD asked Charter to fix its advertising to disclose that there are limitations placed on data usage after reaching a cap.

This particular tussle between Verizon and Charter is typical of the disputes that have been forwarded to NAD over the years. The telcos and cable companies keep a close watch on each other, and complaints are lodged when a carrier makes exaggerated marketing claims.

I predict we’ll see an uptick in advertising disputes as carriers react to being freed from regulation. The FCC clearly no longer regulates broadband as a result of the Sixth Circuit ruling that killed Title II regulation. My guess is this will embolden ISPs and cellular carriers to push the envelope in their advertising to the public.

There are some regulations that will stay on the books. For example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act created broadband labels, and the FCC can’t kill that requirement without action from Congress. But most ISPs have already buried these where customers can’t easily find them.

The Ability of the FCC to Issue Fines

We are definitely entering into a new era in regulation. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are disputing the FCC’s ability to levy fines on them. The fines in question all stem from an FCC action to penalize the carriers for selling customer location data to aggregators. This data allows marketers to become intimately knowledgeable about where people spend their time every day. In the majority of cases, the carriers did not get permission from customers to share their data.

The carriers have all appealed the FCC action, and as is becoming a normal practice, each carrier filed an appeal in a different court. Verizon was fined $46.9 million and filed a brief in the appeal suit in the U.S. Second Court of Appeals. AT&T was fined $57.3 million and filed a brief in the Fifth Circuit. T-Mobile (including a fine against Sprint) was fined $80.1 million and is appealing in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

The FCC started the process of assessing the fines under Chairman Ajit Pai, who proposed the fines and said the carriers’ actions are a violation of customer privacy. The FCC under Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel finalized the fines. Sharing customer data came to light when a sheriff in Missouri was openly using a location-finding service to track the people’s location. The sheriff obtained the data from Securus, a telecom provider that specializes in telecom services for jails and prisons. The FCC said that even after the carriers were made aware of the violation of customer privacy, they continued to sell the location information. The facts in the cases are a bit messy due to Securus’s role in the transactions and statute of limitations.

The three carriers are making roughly the same basic arguments. Verizon claims that the FCC overstepped its authority to enforce issues related to consumer data privacy. Of more interest is that AT&T and Verizon are both arguing that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy means that the FCC has no ability to levy fines and that the companies are entitled to a jury trial. It’s going to take lawsuits like this to define the limit on administrative agencies like the FCC to impose fines on anybody.

There is also a chance that the FCC could stop fighting for the fines. Proposed FCC Chairman Brendon Carr originally dissented against issuing the fines. It’s possible that the FCC could drop its opposition to the suits, which could stop the legal process.

The carriers must be hoping the suits get dropped. This does not seem an issue that the carriers would ever want to take to a jury. It’s not hard to picture a jury – on which every member likely has a cellphone – imposing much larger penalties on the carriers. I suspect most people are uncomfortable with the idea of their cellular carrier selling details of their daily movements to companies they never heard of. It’s not hard to imagine numerous ways that companies could misuse location data to harm people.

If these cases don’t make it to fruition, the courts are going to have to further test the idea in other suits that administrative agencies can’t impose fines. For now, the ability for the FCC to impose fines is in hanging in limbo.

Merger Mania

The industry is suddenly awash with talks of acquisitions and mergers.

In September, Verizon announced the acquisition of Frontier Communications in an all-cash deal valued at $20 billion. The deal was touted for adding Frontier’s fiber customers to Verizon’s base of FiOS customers – which would grow Verizon to approximately 10 million customers.

T-Mobile has announced two acquisitions of fiber overbuilders. The first was the acquisition of Lumos, which has been building fiber in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Lumos currently has over 300,000 customers, but T-Mobile said it would continue to invest for the company to grow pass 3.5 million homes by the end of 2028. T-Mobile also announced the purchase of Metronet, a fiber overbuilder from the Midwest that has expanded into 17 states. Metronet currently passes 2 million homes, and T-Mobile says it will invest to grow to 6.5 million fiber passings by the end of 2030.

T-Mobile is also buying Uscellular from TDS for $4.4 billion. This purchase has drawn attention from six Senators who disapprove of the sale.

As I was writing this blog, Bell Canada, a subsidiary of giant BCE, announced it wants to buy Ziply for $3.6 billion. Ziply was formed in 2020 by buying properties in the Pacific Northwest from Frontier.

DirecTV announced recently that it will acquire all of the video assets of EchoStar, which had just merged with Dish at the beginning of this year. This means that DirecTV will take on all of the Dish video customers along with Sling TV. As part of the merger, DirectTV is also taking on all of EchoStar’s debt.

Will not directly broadband, but highly related, Qualcomm has made overtures to buy Intel. This is a particularly interesting offer since a decade ago Intel had looked at buying Qualcomm.

Fierce Network published an article in September that said that 400 fiber ISPs are ripe for acquisition. Assuming that even just fraction of those ISPs are interested, this foretells a lot more coming announcements of industry consolidation. There is an interesting quote in the article. Andrej Danis of AlixPartners said that many fiber overbuilders “will never reach critical mass.”

This is an interesting observation that highlights the difference between how the financial world and investors look at the fiber business compared to many of the ISPs who have built fiber.

Many fiber businesses clearly have the goal of growing large enough to flip to somebody larger. The investors in these businesses are largely venture capitalists who hope to sell companies at a premium multiple of what they paid to build the business. For example, the Lumos deal is reported to be valued at over $9,000 per existing broadband customer – a lot more than what the company spent to build the existing networks.

Almost anybody who owns a fiber ISP is going to be tempted to sell at those kinds of valuations. But there are still a lot of ISPs with a different motivation. Once a broadband network is mature, it turns into cash cow and spins off a lot of cash annually. I know ISPs that have expanded fiber networks strictly for the permanent cash flow that builds long-term family wealth. Such ISPs envision operating networks for many decades to come.

The Trajectory of FWA

In what is bad news for many other ISPs, both T-Mobile and Verizon have plans to continue their aggressive growth of FWA cellular broadband. As a reminder, this is home broadband delivered from cell towers that mostly uses the same spectrum already being used at cell towers for cell service.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have had unprecedented success with this new broadband product since it first launched in 2021. The following table shows the growth in FWA so far this year.In the first two quarters of this year, the three carriers added almost 1.8 million customers, while big cable companies lost almost 500,000 customers, and big telcos saw a net gain of under 50,000 net new customers.

AT&T is the newest provider of FWA service and just getting serious about selling the service in 2023. AT&T does not provide FWA everywhere it has cell customers, and strategically uses FWA, mostly in rural markets, as a replacement technology when discontinuing copper service. AT&T continues to be focused on fiber expansion and has passed far more new locations with fiber in recent years than anybody else.

T-Mobile has been the most aggressive in deploying FWA broadband and now has over 6 million customers. T-Mobile says it’s goal is to reach 8 million customers by the end of 2026, which would require a continued growth of 400,000 new customers per quarter. T-Mobile recently announced longer-term plans to reach 12 million customers by the end of 2028 – which would mean stepping up customer acquisition to an average of 500,000 net new customers per quarter.

Verizon recently announced plans for aggressive FWA growth. The company says it will set a goal somewhere between 8 and 9 million customers by the end of 2027. This would mean average growth in the range of 275,000 to 350,000 customers per quarter – slower than the current rate of growth.

T-Mobile currently has over 1 million customers on a waiting list for FWA. Like Verizon, T-Mobile uses excess spectrum capacity at cell sites for FWA. Each company likely has an algorithm for each cell site to calculate the safe number of FWA customers that can be added without degrading cellular broadband service. Both carriers have said that they can’t justify building cell sites strictly for FWA service and only plan to deploy it at current or new cellular cell sites.

Verizon has been increasing FWA speeds in some markets by layering on C-band or millimeter wave spectrum for FWA. The advantage FWA has today is lower prices, but the product become formidable if download speeds can compete with fiber and cable companies.

If the three companies meet their growth goals, they will collectively have almost 20 million broadband customers in 2028 – almost as big as Charter or Comcast today. This growth is by far the biggest disruption of the traditional broadband industry, with FWA growth taking customers away from all other ISPs.

The real key to these growth plans is waiting to see if the public likes the FWA product and doesn’t go back to faster broadband alternatives. Reaching 10 million customers so quickly is impressive and unprecedented in the industry. But it’s no guarantee that they can grow at the same pace to reach 20 million customers.