What does 5G bring to ordinary people? This led them to fire their cable provider.
That’s the takeaway from statistics from Leichtman Research Group, which show that 5G home internet services from carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon (aka fixed wireless) will boom in 2023, at the expense of traditional cable and Phone connection.
T-Mobile had the largest increase in raw numbers, adding 2.13 million fixed wireless customers to a total of 4.78 million. However, Verizon’s total number of existing fixed wireless customers more than doubled, rising by 1.54 million to 3.07 million (the number of wired broadband customers increased by another 7.65 million).
Meanwhile, the top cable providers covered in the LRG study lost a combined 63,000 subscribers. Altice USA, which does business as Optimum, lost 114,000 subscribers, and its broadband subscriber base is smaller than T-Mobile’s at 4.52 million; followed by Comcast’s Xfinity, which lost 66,000 subscribers, but still has the largest broadband subscriber base. With 32.25 million subscribers, it remains the largest broadband provider in the United States. Charter, the second-largest company, reported adding 155,000 Spectrum broadband customers to 30.59 million customers in 2023.
Among the top phone telcos, the total number of subscribers fell by 80,000, masking the continued popularity of fiber broadband. LRG found that the companies had a net gain of about 1.97 million fiber subscribers, but that was wiped out by the 2.05 million people who dropped non-fiber connections from these providers.
Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) fared even worse, losing 279,000 subscribers, followed by AT&T (the third largest ISP with 15.29 million subscribers), which lost 98,000 subscribers. Meanwhile, Verizon added a net 166,000 households. Many of the closed accounts were DSL, an ancient and slow cable service delivered over copper phone lines, but not all. Leichtman noted in an email that most of AT&T’s cable line losses are related to people abandoning hybrid fiber-copper service once sold as U-Verse.
LRG pulled the data from company filings and supplemented it with Leichtman’s estimates for private companies such as cable operators Cox and Mediacom.
The appeal of fixed wireless services versus more established rivals isn’t just a matter of lower rates. The services don’t have the data caps prevalent among cable providers (although T-Mobile now allows de-prioritization of the most intensive users) and there are no fine-line fees, leading the FCC to require ISPs to post rate details in a copycat format. Nutrition label.
LRG has seen “FWA” growth escalate dramatically since 2021, with fixed wireless accounting for 20% of net broadband additions before growing to 90% of net additions in 2022 and accounting for 104% of net additions in 2023, according to its release . Last year’s total was a slight understatement because AT&T’s latest quarterly report did not disclose the 67,000 new subscribers to its “Internet Air” wireless service mentioned in a press release at the time.
However, there’s another category of wireless broadband that didn’t appear in Thursday’s report at all: satellite. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary satellite broadband trend data,” Leichtman said.
In particular, SpaceX’s Starlink has provided only minimal details about its U.S. customer base until an FCC filing in December said it had “more than 1.3 million” subscribers. Some of them appear to have abandoned the older, slower and limited-capacity satellite service EchoStar-owned HughesNet, which last week reported a drop of 224,000 subscribers in 2023, to a total of 1 million subscribers.