Over the last months, several major mergers have been announced or completed between cable or telecom operators in the US: Charter-Cox, AT&T-Lumen, Verizon-Frontier, Bell-Ziply Fiber, not to mention the ones associated with T-Mobile. Let’s analyze how those moves illustrate the recent evolutions in the US broadband market, and how they might define new trends going forward. Does the future look brighter for cable operators? Cable operators have struggled in the broadband market lately. Indeed, Charter and Comcast have recorded multiple negative quarters. This situation applies to the whole cable industry overall, and losing subscribers has become a common phenomenon, not to say the norm. Other operators, like Cable One, follow the same trend. It becomes all the more concerning that connectivity, and especially broadband, had become their core focus, following the decline of their linear video business. The saturation of the market has anyway led operators to increasingly eye a stronger ARPU as the relevant metric to assess the value of their broadband business. Nevertheless, cable operators are expected to maintain their dominant market position, and should still account for close to 50 % of the total market by 2030, according to Dataxis’ estimations. Long-term perspectives look more promising, as a result of this upcoming deployment of Docsis 4.0 and as a result of new subsidized broadband projects, through the BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access & Deployment) Program, allowing cable operators to gain ground, especially in rural areas. To get back on the growth track, cablecos will probably have to pursue this “edge-out” strategy in those rural areas, by rolling out new fiber networks close to their legacy HFC infrastructure to expand their footprint. The upgrade to Docsis 4.0, and the associated promise of multi-gig symmetrical speeds, is usually perceived as a source of optimism for cable operators to regain momentum in the broadband market, after mixed results in 2024. In the meantime, fixed wireless and fiber are eating cable’s market share. FWA still full of promises? The narrative around FWA has been changing over the last years. Despite critics during their early success, T-Mobile and Verizon keep recording robust growth for their fixed wireless 5G offers, quarter after quarter. The latter has more than doubled its number of clients – now close to 5M – over the last 2 years, and intends to reach 8 to 9 million subscribers by the end of 2028.. The former exceeded 6.8 million subscribers at Q1 2025 and raised its target to 12 million customers by 2028. The doubts around both capacity and the sustainable potential of this growth have been largely dismissed. Moreover, FWA’s key strength to consumers still essentially lies in its non-prohibitive price (starting from $40 per month) for satisfying speed...
