What to know:
Narrowing the performance gap: Opensignal concluded that new DOCSIS upgrades are helping cable operators dramatically improve upload performance, narrowing the long-standing gap with fiber and making cable a stronger competitor in the premium broadband market.
FWA defies expectations: Fixed Wireless Access continues to improve year-over-year despite growing subscriber loads, challenging early predictions that network performance would deteriorate as adoption increased.
The expansion race: Broadband providers are increasingly using acquisitions to expand their footprints, with operators such as T-Mobile US, Verizon, AT&T, and Charter betting that scale is the fastest path to future growth.
Cable providers take national awards in fixed broadband testing
At a national level, broadband services to the home are continuing to improve — and while fiber still rules when it comes to quality, DOCSIS 4.0 upgrades are narrowing the performance gap for cable providers, according to the newest assessment from Opensignal.
Meanwhile, Fixed Wireless Access services are defying fears that they would eat up massive network bandwidth to the point that reliability would begin to suffer.
Opensignal compared internet services from the five providers with the most extensive service areas in the country: AT&T, Charter (Spectrum), Comcast (Xfinity), T-Mobile US and Verizon. On a technology-neutral basis—meaning that the comparisons were based on a blend of access technologies including cable, DSL, FWA and fiber—the cable providers took four of the five overall awards.
Comcast’s Xfinity service was the overall winner in download speeds, consistent quality and video experience (though the video experience category was a very tight race, with all of the competitors scoring in roughly the same range). Charter’s Spectrum brand edged out its competitors on Opensignal’s reliability metric.
AT&T was the sole telco to take a top spot at the national level in upload speeds, which Opensignal credited to the performance of the company’s fiber network. However, the testing and analysis firm noted that “All operators show improvement across the majority of metrics” compared to a year ago.
Opensignal also published a regional look across metropolitan areas—and in that analysis, both AT&T and Verizon were standouts. AT&T won or tied for more than 100 of the regional awards and Verizon took 45. The cable operators’ wins were more concentrated: Comcast’s Xfinity won 29 awards in 10 of the 28 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) that Opensignal analyzed, and Spectrum was included in the testing in 22 MSAs and won awards across six of them.
The metropolitan analysis showed the strength of some smaller, regional competitors like GFiber and Ziply Fiber in the Pacific Northwest.
“For this report, I think a couple of things stand out,” said Fiona Armstrong-Mills, principal analyst with Opensignal. One, she said, was the “quite surprising” improvement in cable upload performance. “We have this narrative that fiber is supreme in the U.S.—and there’s no denying that in our regional comparisons, fiber does tend to rise to the top. But actually, those improvements in cable—especially on the upload— suggest that those later versions [of DOCSIS] are actually working, [and] are closing that performance gap. And I think that makes them much better positioned in that premium space to start having more of a direct competition, as we move along.”
Armstrong-Mills noted that when it comes to upload speeds in particular, there has been a “gulf” between fiber and cable networks.
Opensignal did record some striking improvements in upload speeds for cable operators: Comcast saw upload speeds increase 20% compared to Opensignal’s data from a year ago, and Charter saw upload speeds jump 36% year-over-year. While the gains were amplified by a relatively low starting baseline for cable upload speeds, Armstrong-Mills pointed out that the DOCSIS investments which are driving the improvements will be worthwhile if cable companies can use them to fight the perception that they can’t compete with fiber as a premium service.
And, she said, the improved upload performance could become increasingly important as AI-powered applications place greater demands on broadband connections. While it remains to be seen just how much of a factor upload capabilities will be in an AI-driven world—and how soon faster upload speeds might be needed—network operators are already thinking about the possibilities.
“Being prepared for that, it shows the cable operators have managed to be ahead of where they need to be for that one,” she said.
FWA improves even with customer growth
At first glance, the stats for the FWA-heavy fixed broadband service provided by T-Mobile US don’t look particularly compelling. In Opensignal’s “head-to-head” comparison of T-Mo’s internet service versus other providers, T-Mobile US was outperformed by its competitors in every category except one: it tied in upload speeds.
The performance numbers fell out that way, Armstrong-Mills explained, because T-Mobile US’ customer base during the data collection period was “almost entirely FWA”. While other providers were assessed across their mix of access technologies that typically included fiber or other high-speed wired options, FWA is still “the vast majority” of T-Mobile’s fixed broadband customers. (Opensignal’s data, collected between January and March of this year, did not include Frontier data in Verizon’s numbers, or T-Fiber in T-Mobile’s results.)
As T-Mo’s fiber base expands and those subscribers get accounted for in Opensignal’s network assessments, its fixed broadband competitive footing “will definitely begin to look different,” Armstrong-Mills said. “You’ll see a more moderate head-to-head performance.”
However, she also pointed out that there was another intriguing indicator in FWA’s year-over-year performance: T-Mobile saw some performance improvements, including a 58-point improvement in the reliability category compared to last year, even as it continues to rack up strong customer additions in FWA.
“FWA continues to perform slightly better year on year—which given the increasing load, especially on T-Mobile, is not necessarily what was expected—certainly in the early days of FWA, where everyone assumed that once users started piling on it would degrade,” Armstrong-Mills said. “And that’s just not really what we’ve seen. It continues to be a good enough, and an improving good enough, solution.”
Consolidation to expand fixed broadband footprints
Opensignal also noted that overall, both telecom providers and cable MSOs are in a race for expansion, with overall market consolidation as a result. Major transactions in the past couple of years have included Verizon’s acquisitions of Frontier for an expanded fiber footprint, and Starry for FWA capabilities; AT&T’s pick-up of Lumen’s fiber assets and more spectrum for FWA use; the pending merger between Charter Communications and Cox Communications on the cable side. T-Mo, of course, has been building out its fiber service area aggressively through a series of joint venture investments.
As network operators snatch up new assets, they aren’t necessarily looking to use them as an immediate launching pad for new build-outs—the growth through acquisition is the point.
“It seems to be that the dynamic is that acquiring additional footprint is the most effective way to scale at this time,” Armstrong-Mills said.
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