Brutal Year for Pay TV Sees Wireless Carrier Broadband Picking Up Steam

pcmag.com:

Fixed-wireless broadband boomed in 2022 while traditional pay-TV had its worst bloodbath yet, according to two new reports on subscriber trends from Leichtman Research Group.

That Durham, N.H., consultancy posted its recap(Opens in a new window) of broadband subscriber additions and losses Thursday—and where previous assessments have found cable collecting the most new subs, the 2022 edition has fixed wireless accounting for an overwhelming majority of the industry’s growth.

T-Mobile’s home broadband alone racked up 2 million new subs, with Verizon’s wireless home broadband—helped by that carrier’s C-band 5G rollout and deep price cuts—signed up another 1.17 million. 

Next to that combined 3.17 million, the 517,000-plus new subscribers among the largest cable providers (led by Charter with 344,000 and then Comcast with 250,000, with a 103,000-subscriber loss at Altice offsetting those gains) looked far less impressive.

Broadband providers with wireline-phone heritage, however, lost about 181,000 subscribers, thanks mainly to Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) seeing 253,000 subscribers exit and AT&T dropping 118,000. Verizon, meanwhile, gained 119,000 subs.

AT&T’s fiber service topped PCMag’s Readers’ Choice rankings last year with a score of 8.8 out of 10; among other providers covered in Leichtman’s report, Verizon Fios ranked third with a score of 8.2, Verizon 5G Home Internet came in fourth with 8.1, and T-Mobile Home Internet was in sixth place at 7.7. AT&T’s overall loss reflects the continued decay of its non-fiber broadband(Opens in a new window), which delivers much slower speeds.

The subscriber data that Leichtman posted Friday(Opens in a new window), meanwhile, make the traditional pay-TV bundle look almost as