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What has 5G done for normal people? It’s let them fire their cable provider.That’s the takeaway from Leichtman Research Group stats that show a boom in 5G home internet services from carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon (aka fixed wireless) in 2023—at the expense of traditional cable and phone-based connectivity.T-Mobile saw the biggest gain in raw numbers, with an increase of 2.13 million fixed-wireless customers, bringing it to 4.78 million total. Verizon, however, more than doubled its existing fixed-wireless subscriber total, adding 1.54 million to reach 3.07 million (with its wireline broadband accounting for another 7.65 million).Meanwhile, the top cable providers covered in LRG’s study lost a combined 63,000 subscribers. Altice USA, which does business as Optimum, lost 114,000 and fell below T-Mobile in size at 4.52 million broadband customers, followed by Comcast’s Xfinity, which lost 66,000 subscribers but retained its title as the nation’s largest broadband provider with 32.25 million total. The second-largest, Charter, reported an increase of 155,000 subscribers to its Spectrum broadband, finishing 2023 with 30.59 million subscribers.Among the top phone-based telcos, a combined drop of 80,000 subscribers obscures the continued popularity of fiber broadband. LRG found that those firms saw a net increase of some 1.97 million fiber subscribers—erased by 2.05 million people who ditched non-fiber connections from those providers. Lumen, formerly CenturyLink, fared worse with a decline of 279,000 subscribers, followed by AT&T (the third biggest ISP, with 15.29 million customers), which lost 98,000 subs. Verizon, meanwhile, racked up a net increase of 166,000. Many of these closed accounts were DSL, an old and slow wired service delivered over copper phone lines, but not all. In an email, Leichtman noted that most of AT&T’s wireline losses involved people dropping the hybrid fiber-copper service once marketed as U-Verse.LRG draws these numbers from corporate filings, supplemented by Leichtman’s estimates for such privately held firms as cable operators Cox and Mediacom.The appeal of fixed-wireless services over more established rivals isn’t just a matter of lower rates. These offerings come without the data caps endemic among cable providers (although T-Mobile now allows for the deprioritization of the most intensive users) and lack the fine-print fees that led the FCC to require ISPs to post rate details in a format modeled after nutrition labels.
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LRG has seen the growth of “FWA” escalate dramatically since 2021—when, its release notes, fixed wireless accounted for 20% of net broadband additions, then grew to 90% of 2022 net adds and made up 104% of 2023’s. And last year’s total slightly understates the reality, since AT&T’s latest quarterly filing doesn’t break out the 67,000 new subscribers for its “Internet Air” wireless service noted in a press release at the time.Another category of no-wires broadband, however, doesn’t show up in Thursday’s report at all: satellite. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary trending data for satellite broadband,” Leichtman said. In particular, SpaceX’s Starlink offered minimal details about its US customer base until an FCC filing in December cited “more than 1.3 million” subscribers. Some of those people appear to have left an older, slower, and capacity-constrained satellite service—EchoStar-owned HughesNet, which last week reported a loss of 224,000 subscribers in 2023 that left it at 1 million total.
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