WASHINGTON, August 5, 2025 – Cable broadband providers aren’t expected to return to subscriber growth anytime soon.
The broadband industry added roughly as many subscribers in the second quarter of 2025 as the same period last year, New Street Research reported. That was the result of fiber and fixed wireless improving while cable losses got worse.
The major providers New Street tracks added about 336,000 subscribers in the quarter, including estimates for Altice USA, which has yet to report. New Street analyst Vikash Harlalka wrote in an investor note that was about 5,000 higher than the same time last year after adjusting for the immediate impact of the ACP drying up, and within pre-pandemic range of normal.
Fiber and fixed wireless added more subscribers than last year, though, and cable lost more. Adjusted for ACP, cable lost 100,000 more subs, while fiber and fixed wireless gained 25,000 and 30,000 respectively. Losses from legacy copper networks also improved.
“It appears that all technologies improved slightly at cable’s expense,” he wrote. “With [year over year] growth remaining below pre-pandemic levels, stable trends aren’t enough to return cable to subscriber growth, [especially] with FWA adds remaining elevated.”
While the short-term subscriber losses from the end of the ACP are in the rearview mirror, Charter executives have said the company is still feeling the effects. Customers who signed up after the subsidy ended but would have qualified are less able to consistently pay their bills, as are those who had received the subsidy but have been continuing to make payments.
The company said it was driven in part by higher levels of non-pay churn – people disconnecting after failing to pay their internet bill – in the quarter. Fellow cable giant Comcast said it saw a slight uptick, but that it was “not material.”
“For Cable to return to subscriber growth, either industry growth has to improve or FWA net adds have to slow down,” Harlalka wrote. “For now, we haven’t seen evidence of either.”
Consulting firm PwC released a report on Monday, shared with Broadband Breakfast, that projected cable companies generally would continue losing subscribers through 2029, with the sector expected to lose 8 of its subscribers. The firm expected cable would still be the dominant broadband technology in the U.S. “for the foreseeable future” though, owing to its huge lead in subscribers – 81.2 million across the country at the end of 2024.
The firm projected fiber would grow more than 50 percent to 54.3 million by the end of 2029, and that fixed wireless would grow nearly 77 percent to more than 13.4 million.
The fiber growth “is expected to come from organic buildout from operators, the use of wholesale agreements with open access providers, and a variety of private and public funding (such as the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, referred to as BEAD) to expand fibre coverage and, subsequently, fibre subscriptions.”
The cable giants have been leaning into their wireless services and instituting new pricing plans in a bid to keep subscribers around. Fixed and mobile broadband bundles are an effort to reduce churn, and the pricing changes are efforts to address consumer frustration over price hikes.
Those services are continuing to grow, with 837,000 net additional lines between the two last quarter. Comcast and Charter count about 19.3 million wireless subscribers.
Despite Charter’s stock tumbling in the wake of worse-than-expected broadband losses in the wuarter – Comcast lost many more subscribers, but didn’t see a similar drop because Wall Street exepected as much – Charter CEO Chris Winfrey remains confident. He unloaded $1 million on more Charter shares last week.