T-Mobile said Thursday that it added 541,000 fixed wireless access users in the fourth quarter, and around 2.1 million for the full year, making 2023 its biggest FWA growth year ever.
T-Mobile has now amassed nearly 4.78 million 5G Home Internet customers since it launched the service in April 2021. (The company's Q4 earnings release is available here.)
Collectively, T-Mobile and Verizon now control nearly 8 million FWA customers, a number that has swelled quickly as FWA pricing has undercut the competition.
Also read: Verizon Surpasses 3 Million Fixed Wireless Customers With 375K Additions in Q4
However, T-Mobile last week quietly gave up some of its price advantage, bumping up the bills of new FWA customers who don't already take smart phone service from the company to $60 a month ($65 for those who don't do AutoPay).
Pricing for new T-Mobile wireless customers still ranges from $40 - $50 a month, depending on the plan you have (CNET has a good breakdown of the company's 5G Home Internet pricing here.)
T-Mobile is raising prices on home broadband as cable competitors also figure out ways to make wireless/wireline convergence work for them. Charter Communications, for example, is offering 300 Mbps service for $50 a month to its Spectrum Mobile users.
Meanwhile, there are indicators supporting the cable industry's long-held belief that FWA would eventually bump up against capacity issues.
On Tuesday, for instance, The Mobile Report noticed that T-Mobile has -- also quietly -- inserted new terms of service mandating that power users who consume more than 1.2 terabytes of data a month will get throttled during moments of network congestion.
Notably, T-Mobile says this isn't technically "throttling," since users' speeds go back up once peak usage times ebb.
Also notable: T-Mobile's FWA customers are second in line behind mobile customers for network resources. And with the fixed wireless user base rapidly increasing, this seems to us like a sign that FWA resources are beginning to be spread thin.
