T-Mobile continued to lead the way on fixed wireless access services throughout 2024, but Verizon started to narrow the gap in quarterly net adds and AT&T saw its Internet Air numbers increase faster than expected.
Impact: Despite a bit of a slowdown in quarterly net adds throughout 2024, fixed wireless isn’t going anywhere anytime soon as it continues to drive broadband growth across the industry. T-Mobile led the way with more than 6.4 million FWA subscribers at the close of Q4, an increase of 34.6% since year-end 2023 while Verizon wrapped 2024 with nearly 4.6 million FWA customers, up 48.9% year-over-year, and AT&T’s much smaller (but growing) fixed wireless presence grew to 635,000 total Internet Air customers at year-end after adding 542,000 customers in the past year. All three carriers beat analyst expectations for FWA growth in Q4, not something cable operators wanted to hear during a quarter when their broadband subscriber numbers continued to trend negatively.
T-Mobile set the standard for FWA net adds in Q4 with 428,000, a sequential increase of 3.1%. But net adds dropped 20.9% YOY as the carrier experienced quarterly declines of at least 20% YOY in every quarter of 2024 and never approached the 500,000 per quarter mark after T-Mobile executives warned in 2023 that FWA would suffer a slowdown in subscriber growth in 2024. CFO Peter Osvaldik said strong demand for fixed wireless from existing customers helped drive T-Mobile’s growth, but he hinted that the carrier also managed to pick up its fair share of new subscribers in both Q4 and throughout the year. For the full year, T-Mobile added 1.65 million new FWA customers, and CEO Mike Sievert made sure to point out that T-
Mobile’s fixed wireless product has been driving broadband growth in the industry for the last several years. That’s something T-Mobile doesn’t plan to let up on anytime soon as it works to increase its own fixed wireless subscriber base to 12 million by 2028. T-Mobile should also get an FWA subscriber boost when it closes its proposed acquisition of UScellular later this year, provided the deal makes it through regulatory approval process.
Verizon also experienced a small slide in its quarterly fixed wireless net adds in 2024 but still managed to narrow the gap with its rival. The company added 373,000 fixed wireless subscribers in Q4 to T-Mobile’s 428,000, a difference of just 55,000. Verizon’s total net adds increased 2.8% sequentially and were mostly flat YOY in Q4. But Verizon saw its residential FWA net adds decline 6.5% YOY to 216,000 even as it extended its fixed wireless coverage with more C-band deployments. The company expects to provide a boost to its residential FWA numbers later this year when it rolls out fixed wireless service to MDUs. And despite the YOY residential decline, Verizon said it remains on track to double its FWA subscriber base and reach 8 million to 9 million total FWA subscribers by 2028. For the full year, Verizon added close to 1.5 million FWA subscribers as the technology drove broadband growth throughout the year.
Though AT&T moved into fixed wireless much later than its two rivals and primarily considers it a bridge product between legacy copper and fiber, the company added a best-ever 158,000 Internet Air net adds in Q4 and reported 542,000 net adds for the full year. The success of Internet Air has made AT&T executives look more favorably at FWA, and they especially like that Internet Air has helped keep overall broadband numbers positive. Given AT&T’s plans to get out of the legacy copper business in nearly every market it serves over the next several years, it’s possible the company could build a healthy Internet Air subscriber base in that timeframe even though its unlikely to approach T-Mobile and Verizon subscriber levels. But even if overall FWA growth slows further, the technology’s impact on broadband subscriber growth should continue through the end of the decade if not longer.
