Charter Pushing Bundles to Compete with Fixed Wireless
Cable executives have agreed the service is sticking around.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4, 2025 – Fixed wireless has the most success against cable in markets where fiber isn’t already competing for subscribers, Charter’s CFO said Thursday.
“Fixed wireless is most impactful in those areas where we don’t have a fiber overbuilder yet,” Charter CFO Jessica Fischer said. “The impact of a new competitor in that environment is different than it is in the spaces where we have a fiber build.”
Fischer spoke at the Bank of America Media, Communications and Entertainment Conference in New York.
Fixed wireless broadband, provided via excess capacity on the mobile carriers’ networks, has in recent years been competing fiercely with cable, steadily adding subscribers as cable continues to shed them. Fixed wireless is up to about 13.5 million subscribers in total, adding more than 900,000 last quarter. That’s still dwarfed in size by Charter and Comcast, who each count about 30 million broadband subscribers, but Comcast posted worst-ever losses of 226,000 last quarter. Charter fared better at 117,000 lost subs, but it was worse than expected.
Fischer said Charter was trying to “make ourselves a better competitor against fixed wireless” by pushing the message that Charter’s converged bundles, combining fixed and mobile broadband, are a better value than the same plans from fixed wireless providers. Charter’s video service can also “really attract customers into, and be an asset to, the broadband business,” she said.
Charter and Comcast have in the last year also introduced new pricing packages and price locks in a bid to assuage consumer frustration over rate hikes, something they’ve identified as a reason subscribers have looked elsewhere.
The cable giants appear to agree that fixed wireless is sticking around. Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said the service would have a “permanent” role in the cheaper end of the market. Fischer emphasized that the service can only keep growing for so long, as spectrum capacity is finite, but said she didn’t know when it would really start to slow down.
The mobile carriers and cable operators are leaning into converged offers, which keep customers around longer. Mobile has been a bright spot for the cable giants, who count about 18.8 million such subscribers between them.
While broadband subscriber growth appears a ways away for cable, Charter and Comcast have the advantage of much larger wireline footprints in which to offer their increasingly successful mobile services. The carrier's convergence push will depend on their fixed wireless headroom in many areas, telecom analyst Craig Moffett has argued.
With EchoStar expected to liquidate much of its spectrum amid pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, some extra capacity for the service is apparently on the way.
AT&T, the first to finalize terms of a spectrum purchase from EchoStar, is indeed planning to offer the fixed wireless in more areas and market it more aggressively, the carrier’s CFO said Thursday at the conference. The company hasn’t pushed the service as hard as Verizon and T-Mobile, which count 5.1 million and 7.3 million subscribers respectively, compared to AT&T’s 1 million.
New Street Research analysts estimated the extra airwaves could support an additional 900,000 fixed wireless subscribers on their own for AT&T, in addition to its current capacity.
Fischer didn’t give specifics on the broadband subscriber numbers the company will report at its third quarter earnings call.
“There’s not a lot I can say on third quarter broadband trends,” she said. “I think the market continues to be a competitive space.”
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