Americans love the internet, accessing it from home and on the road. Until 2007, Americans essentially had two choices when it came to home internet: cable internet or DSL. To the cable industries great credit, they were the first to provide high speed internet access to most Americans with DSL, a slow “other choice” if cable was not available or was too expensive. But beginning in 2007, the telecom companies began to build out fiber, first with Verizon FiOS, and then by AT&T launching fiber service in 2013. By launching fiber networks, telecom companies brought competition to cable in the home broadband market and offered Americans more choices for connecting to the Internet.
In the last three years, the competitive landscape has changed again, for the benefit of American consumers of all stripes. The mobile network operators have launched Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and, as we saw during Hurricane Helene, satellite provider Starlink proved its prowess in rural, hard to reach geographies.
FWA has become such a popular choice that the cable companies are losing home internet customers to FWA providers, a trend that has thumped the cablecos market cap. Since launch, Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T added 10.675 million customers to their FWA service. And almost all of those subscribers came from cable companies.
FWA service is typically slightly less expensive that fiber or cable home internet, but its satisfaction scores across all 16 cNPS categories is higher.
Part of the reason for the superior cNPS scores are a better purchasing and installation experience for consumers, lower price points and the ability to easily return the product if it does not meet the customer’s satisfaction. This leads to the customers who use the service to be happy with it, while the unhappy customers cancel the service, return the router and continue service with their existing provider and continue to be less than happy with them.
The high satisfaction and lower price for FWA and the dissatisfaction with the other choices available has led FWA to become the preferred next home internet provider of choice for Americans.
Based on interviews with 288,490 Americans conducted between July 2023 and December 2024, 44% of Americans would choose an FWA as their next provider if they would have to make a choice other than their existing provider, 25% would choose a fiber provider, 17% a cable provider, and 6% each would choose DSL or a satellite provider (predominantly Starlink.)
The change in customer preferences is also an opportunity. FWA is the first home internet offer that is being advertised on a nationwide basis, both on a standalone and converged basis. More than 70% of FWA customers are using the mobile solution of the same provider. We are also increasingly seeing a remarkable amount of customers who are switching from one FWA provider to another indicating both a preference for FWA as well as a high aversion to the available wired solutions available. It is also a wakeup call for existing providers, especially cable, to improve their service, both on a technical basis with DOCSIS 4.0 and a relational basis in how they interact with their customers. We are full of hope as some cable providers are introducing NPS as a metric they look at and full of dismay as FWA is being described as CPI or Cell Phone Internet. By describing FWA as cell phone internet, these cable providers do themselves a disservice as cell phones have nothing to do with FWA other than the network they use and shows a blindness to the real threat FWA provides to them. As long as cable views FWA as CPI it will continue to lose as it lives in its own world disconnected from the preferences of everyday Americans.
This has interesting implications for the spectrum policy world. Cable, understandably, is trying to prevent new licensed, full power spectrum to be authorized for cellular use. Why would they? That additional spectrum will enable the mobile operators to offer even more FWA options. While the wireless industry is pushing hard for more full power, commercial spectrum, it is not a done deal. In 2024, we have seen FWA speeds and the availability to sign up with FWA in urban market decline indicating that the growth of FWA is becoming more of a supply issue than a lack of demand. Hence the need for more full power spectrum to amp up network capacity to support more FWA.
The outgoing 118th Congress failed to provide Americans with a spectrum pipeline and the FCC with general spectrum authority (Congress provided for temporary spectrum authority to reauction the returned AWS-3 licenses.) The chances that the incoming 119th Congress that takes over in 2025 will provide a spectrum pipeline with licensed, full-powered spectrum is much higher. The last Trump White House leaned much more heavily on the Department of Defense and was able to clear the 3.45 GHz spectrum for commercial use in a record one-year time period. The incoming Senate Commerce Committee Chairman, Senator Cruz (R-TX), has also traditionally been less accommodating to Department of Defense preferences and FCC failure to live up to its congressionally mandated requirements.
In a nutshell, FWA has higher satisfaction scores than any other technology and more Americans want FWA as the way they connect to the internet than any other choice. It is up to Congress to decide if Americans get their wish.
