T-Mobile continued to swallow big chunks of home internet market share from cable in Q3, with the wireless company adding another 557,000 fixed wireless access customers during the quarter.
It was T-Mobile’s biggest FWA growth quarter so far this year, and it increased the company's fixed wireless subscriber base to 4.24 million users. Customer growth was down narrowly, by 3.6%, over the third quarter of 2022.
With Verizon Communications reporting 384,000 FWA adds in Q3 on Tuesday, T-Mobile and Verizon now have more than 6.9 million fixed wireless customers between them. Notably, AT&T has also entered the arena, adding 25,000 customers in the third quarter.
Collectively, cable operators still control around 67% of U.S. home internet subscriptions. But wireless operators touting 5G speeds and discount pricing for home internet service over cellular continue to expand at a time of high-speed internet stagnation for MSOs.
On Wednesday, however, an end game for FWA became visible.
T-Mobile has based its FWA business on excess wireless network capacity. And as equity analyst Craig Moffett noted, the company is more than halfway toward reaching its long-term customer guidance for the modestly scoped operation.
T-Mobile president and CEO Mike Sievert said the company continues to look for ways to expand network capacity for FWA. Possible solutions include adding millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum.
But don't look for T-Mobile to invest a lot of capital into owning the cable business. Sievert said investments into home broadband “should be capital-light” and “generally off-balance sheet.”
For its part, Comcast just started deploying its next-generation network built around full-duplex DOCSIS 4.0 technology, which is capable, out of the gate, of symmetrical speeds of 2 gigabits per second. Comcast and the rest of the U.S. cable industry hope to be offering 10 Gbps speeds over their legacy hybrid fiber-coaxial cables in the near future.
Q3 cable earnings kick off Thursday morning with Comcast's presentation.
