T-Mobile stepped up efforts to draw in new customers for its fixed wireless access (FWA) Home Internet service, unveiling a series of fresh promotional offers during its latest UnCarrier event. New Street Research analysts said the move could help accelerate its subscriber gains at cable’s expense, though noted the forecast for T-Mobile’s total number of FWA customers remains the same.
Among other things, the operator said it will allow prospective users trial its Home Internet service free for 15 days, expanding a program initially rolled out for wireless subscribers. It also offered a $20 per month rate cut for subscribers who tack on FWA to their mobile family plan and said everyone else will be able to lock in the usual $50 per month rate for as long as they’re a customer. The latter was notable in light of AT&T’s announcement earlier in the week that it is raising the monthly rate for certain broadband customers by $3.
In Q1, T-Mobile added 348,000 fixed wireless customers to end the quarter with a total of 948,000. The net addition figure was more than triple the 93,000 it posted in Q1 2021. It crossed the 1 million subscriber mark last month. T-Mobile said previously it is aiming to reach between 7 million and 8 million subscribers by 2025, and earlier this year said it was stealing share from both cable and fiber.
Before the announcement, New Street Research (NSR) had forecast T-Mobile would add 1.7 million FWA customers in the full year 2022, while consensus from other analysts was closer to 1.1 million.
In a note following the UnCarrier event, NSR said the new family plan offer could help T-Mobile fend off competition from cable operators’ converged fixed and mobile offers. This could accelerate its gains in the near term, causing pain for both cable and fiber players, with the former more severely impacted.
But there’s an upper limit to T-Mobile’s success given capacity constraints.
“This means terminal market shares for T-Mobile FWB and cable will be no different than they were before these announcements, but T-Mobile may get to that terminal point even faster, and cause even more near-term pain for cable with these moves than had been expected,” NSR’s Jonathan Chaplin wrote.
On the fiber front, “the acceleration at T-Mobile is likely to dampen gross adds for fiber companies in the very near-term more so than was expected prior to the event, potentially slowing their progress toward penetration targets temporarily,” he concluded.
In addition to capacity limitations, T-Mobile is also up against the rise of multi-gig broadband speeds in the fixed arena. Recon Analytics founder Roger Entner previously told Fierce fixed wireless providers like T-Mobile and Verizon have “a window of opportunity of 2, 3, 4 years before fiber and potentially DOCSIS 4.0 come in with pretty ubiquitous speeds.” While these will likely mean FWA is less successful in urban and suburban areas, Entner noted the technology could have a longer shelf life in rural areas.