With the cable industry's broadband customer growth still in recession -- Comcast said Thursday that it lost another 19,000 subscribers in the second quarter -- the fixed wireless access business keeps humming along.
T-Mobile said that it added 509,000 FWA customers in Q2, upping its base to just under 4 million subscribers. The growth rate came in just under the 560,000 subs the wireless company tacked on between April - June last year.
Verizon, which added 384,000 FWA customers in the second quarter, now has a base of nearly 2.3 million FWA subscribers.
Fixed wireless access lacks the speed and performance of cable broadband. But with prices for 5G FWA home internet service tiers coming in at around $50 a month, customers are switching over in droves.
As the wireless business eats into cable's dominant U.S. wireline broadband market share, the cable companies are seeing explosive growth for their MVNO-based mobile services. Q2 marked the seventh consecutive quarter during which Comcast added more than 300,000 Xfinity Mobile service lines.
For his part, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert told equity analysts Thursday that cable operators are stealing market share from providers of pre-paid mobile service, not T-Mobile.
"T-Mobile is winning the switching decisions," he said.
