- Residential fixed wireless access (FWA) gross adds are expected to plateau for major U.S. carriers, according to New Street Research
- Verizon already saw flat gross adds and a decline in net FWA subscribers in Q4 2025, while AT&T and T-Mobile continue to post positive FWA growth– for now
- FWA accounted for 32% of overall broadband gross adds in Q4, as cable dropped to its lowest share yet at 41%
Major U.S. carriers have thus far seen reasonable growth in fixed wireless access (FWA) gross additions, but the analysts at New Street Research said a plateau is incoming.
The firm’s latest broadband trends report found residential FWA gross adds increased about 24% year-over-year in Q4 2025. But gross adds were “sequentially flat” compared to the 33% growth in the prior quarter.
Gross adds measure all newly acquired customers, while net adds are a measure of newly acquired customers minus estimated disconnects.
AT&T and T-Mobile’s FWA growth remains positive, for now, as both saw net subscribers increase YoY in Q4 from 158,000 to 221,000 for AT&T and from 428,000 to 495,000 for T-Mobile. However, Verizon's net FWA adds dropped from 373,000 in Q4 2024 to 319,000 in Q4 2025, which New Street attributed to flat gross adds and higher disconnect rates.
“As gross adds plateau, net adds will fall as disconnects will continue to grow with the base,” New Street analysts predict.
Given AT&T’s late entrance into FWA compared to its peers, it’s no shocker that the company is still growing gross adds, said New Street, which previously noted AT&T has only used up one-sixth of its estimated FWA capacity.
With EchoStar’s 3.45 GHz spectrum at its disposal, AT&T will likely deploy incremental capacity to “drive even higher FWA net adds,” the analysts wrote.
The analysts are surprised that T-Mobile keeps growing gross FWA adds. Despite reaching nearly two-thirds of its addressable FWA capacity, T-Mobile has raised its multi-year subscriber target from 12 million by 2028 to 15 million by 2030 and is also seeing an influx of new customers from urban markets.
As for Verizon, it eyes more FWA growth with its Starry acquisition and a new FWA network slice offering for enterprise customers that want to boost uplink capacity for AI workloads.
FWA is now 32% of total broadband gross adds
New Street also compared overall gross adds of FWA to those of cable, fiber and DSL, noting FWA’s number of gross adds coincides with the decline of cable’s share.
The firm found FWA’s share of gross adds jumped to 32% of the market in Q4 2025, up about 510 basis points (or 5.1%) year-on-year. Cable meanwhile saw its gross adds share drop 5.4% to 41%, the lowest it’s been since New Street started tracking this data.
To counter FWA and fiber competition, we’ve seen operators like Comcast and Optimum advertise cheaper, simplified internet plans to lure subscribers. Although such plans could curtail subscriber losses, cable companies might instead face an “erosion” of average revenue per user, as Wolfe Research analyst Peter Supino noted in January.
Fiber broadband’s share of gross adds was about 26%, “relatively stable” for the past four quarters, New Street said. Interestingly, the firm pointed out that residential fiber net adds didn’t drastically increase YoY, just from 486,000 in Q4 2024 to 497,000 in Q4 2025.
At the same time, consolidation is ramping in the fiber-to-the-home space, and both operators and analysts find mergers offer a better return on investment (ROI) than overbuilding into markets where there are already multiple gigabit service providers.