Ben Midanek is a marketing and customer acquisition executive with 15+ years’ experience delivering profitable growth across the telecommunications and media sectors, most recently serving as Chief Marketing Officer for Kinetic, an internet service provider with >1M customers across 18 states.
This article is the first in a two-part series on the rise of FWA home internet offerings, its impact on the US broadband market, and the differences in customer experience and perceptions that are reshaping consumer preferences. This first article examines FWA’s industry-leading growth and consumer loyalty, and the second will dive into the underlying differences in brand perception, product attributes, and customer experience driving consumer preference for FWA.
Rise of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA)
The emergence of 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) internet offerings – led by T-Mobile’s 5G Home Internet – is disrupting the U.S. broadband market with major implications across the competitive landscape.
Since early 2021, FWA offerings have attracted a large and growing share of new U.S. internet subscribers, reaching >13M customers by early 2025. FWA’s growth has come at the expense of existing broadband providers, resulting in significant subscriber losses for cable providers (from 5.2M net adds in 2020 to 1.3M net losses in 2024) and slower penetration growth for fiber providers (from 1.8M net adds in 2020 to 2.0M in 2024, despite a >50% increase in homes serviceable by fiber). The shifting competitive landscape has also accelerated the trend towards convergence and driven increasing industry consolidation.
FWA delivers high-speed wireless internet over existing cellular networks. Providers – primarily T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T – offer FWA internet in areas where they have excess spectrum capacity, allowing them to generate incremental revenue without creating congestion that would impact the more profitable mobile business. In addition to the incremental broadband revenue, providers can use FWA offerings – and the ability to offer attractive bundle pricing for mobile and home internet – to win new mobile customers (and improve retention of existing mobile subscribers) in these areas as well.
Unlike cable and fiber, which require major capital investments and long timelines to reach new markets, FWA can be deployed with minimal incremental network investments. This has allowed FWA providers to rapidly expand their footprints, entering markets where deploying fiber may be cost-prohibitive and introducing competition in areas that previously had very limited high-speed internet options. Low deployment costs also allow FWA providers to offer attractive pricing, with low rates and everyday pricing guarantees. Because the majority of U.S. households have only one (typically cable) or two (typically cable + fiber) options for high-speed wired internet service, the introduction of a new competitor to a market inevitably impacts all providers’ share of the pie.
Cable providers have seen a particularly pronounced impact, with the major providers recording several consecutive quarters of subscriber losses (~300-400k / quarter), and have been faster to recognize and respond to the competitive threat. Fiber providers, on the other hand, have been slower to acknowledge the impact of FWA on subscriber growth. Many have argued that FWA is not a meaningful threat to their growth because it’s simply an inferior technology that can’t match the speed, reliability, or customer experience of a fiber-to-the-home network.
While much of this argument may prove true over the long term – particularly as fiber’s technological advantages become more important with growing bandwidth needs and FWA’s growth is curtailed by capacity constraints – fiber providers should not underestimate the competitive threat posed by FWA in the meantime. Data from NPS Prism brings to life the magnitude of this competitive threat and provides compelling evidence that FWA is delivering a customer experience that not only far exceeds cable, but is superior to fiber as well.
Better overall internet experience
FWA home internet customers report meaningfully higher relationship NPS (rNPS) than consumers with fiber or cable connections. While the gap is particularly pronounced compared to customers of cable, FWA customers’ rNPS is also >20pts higher than customers of fiber. The three largest fiber providers recorded rNPS below even the lowest-rated FWA provider.
Similarly, among fiber customers of the top three providers who say they’re highly likely to switch to a new provider in the next 12 months, T-Mobile is directionally the leading alternative in the consideration set, demonstrating the appeal of FWA offerings even for customers of the superior technology.
What’s driving these changes?
FWA home internet offerings have seen explosive growth since launching in mid-2020, resulting in significant subscriber losses for cable providers and slower growth for fiber operators. At the same time, FWA providers have garnered stronger customer advocacy despite the technology’s inferior speeds and network reliability. All of which begs the question: what is behind FWA’s rapid growth and consumer preference?
The next article in this series will use data from NPS Prism to examine the underlying differences in brand perception, product attributes, and customer experience to better understand what’s driving these changes.
Schedule a personalized discovery session to explore our platform and gain never-before-seen NPS insights based on thousands of broadband customers, with competitive analyses curated to give you insights on how your customers are responding to new developments in the market like the rise of FWA.