Cable to Keep Losing Broadband Subscribers to Fixed Wireless, Fiber: Dell'Oro's Heynen
Fiber and fixed wireless are expected to keep eroding the dominant market share of cable in North American broadband in the coming years, Dell'Oro Group's Jeff Heynen said Wednesday at a Fiber Broadband Association webinar. Cable had been dismissive of how resilient fixed-wireless access (FWA) would be as a competitor, but the industry has now accepted that a lot of its subscriber losses are due to FWA, Heynen said.
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By 2029, 29% of North American residential broadband subscribers will get service via fiber, up from 22% in 2024, according to Dell'Oro estimates. FWA will account for 16% of residential subscribers in 2029, up from 10% in 2024, while low earth orbit satellite will have a 4% share by 2029, up from 2.7%. Dell'Oro also said cable's 57.8% share in 2024 is likely to drop to 51% in 2029, averaging subscriber losses of 1 million to 1.2 million annually.
While telcos had been concerned that spectrum overuse would be a bottleneck for FWA, lower growth rates for mobile data are letting operators expand the FWA availability, Heynen said.
Cable's subscriber losses to FWA are particularly pronounced in markets where cable hasn't upgraded yet to DOCSIS 3.1 and where customer service was particularly lacking, he added. Wireless and fiber are "kind of this two-pronged attack" against cable by telcos, but at the same time, cable operators have been successful in snagging mobile subscribers from telcos.
With relatively high broadband penetration rates in certain markets, gaining subscribers is getting tougher for providers, Heynen noted. Pointing to examples of consolidation such as Charter/Cox, T-Mobile/Lumos and AT&T/Lumen Fiber, he said such deals to add network assets are about reaching larger addressable markets.
On copper decommissioning, Heynen said fiber expansion is helping drive momentum, citing AT&T's plan to retire its copper network by the end of 2029. He predicted that other operators will follow suit, due to the cheaper operating costs and lower power consumption of fiber networks over copper. BEAD awards will also propel some fiber expansions and transitions, he said: Charter used Rural Digital Opportunity Fund awards as an opportunity to do fiber, and other networks will follow the same blueprint with BEAD.
FWA so far isn't a big winner in BEAD, and it wasn't expected to be, Heynen added. Carriers are using FWA as a way to steal cable and legacy DSL customers while planning to eventually transition those FWA subscribers to fiber, he said.
Heynen also noted that shipments of Wi-Fi 7 routers are starting to ramp up, though much of that activity is being driven in markets like China, with its fiber-to-the-room deployments, and some European areas. Meanwhile, chip samples for Wi-Fi 8 routers have started to come out, he said, with those devices likely shipping by late 2029 or early 2030, meaning Wi-Fi 7 should have a three- to four-year cycle.