Buckle up, cable—AT&T just gave FWA fresh legs

First, cable and fiber companies dismissed fixed wireless access (FWA) completely. Then, they passed it off as a temporary fad. Subscribers, they said, will return to their wireline providers when wireless bandwidth inevitably runs out. While that may still prove true in the long run, the team at New Street Research (NSR) indicated things aren’t exactly looking pretty in the short term. Until now, the FWA market has been dominated by T-Mobile and Verizon, with the former adding a total of 541,000 FWA subs in Q4 2023 and the latter 375,000, according to NSR’s count. AT&T ended 2023 with 93,000 Internet Air subs after launching in the back half of the year. NSR said based on early results, AT&T’s FWA trajectory looks a lot like T-Mobile’s. While AT&T executives haven’t given much insight into the growth they expect, NSR predicted the company will add around 180,000 FWA subs per quarter over the next few quarters, with a peak expected to come in six to eight quarters. One thing that’s not factored into NSR’s forecast is AT&T’s hiccup, a cellular outage which left tens of thousands of customers in the U.S. and Canada stuck without service.  It’s not entirely clear what caused the disruption, but given Internet Air runs on AT&T’s cellular network, it’s worth considering how it will play into AT&T’s efforts.