Wireless Market Increasingly Competitive: AT&T

WASHINGTON, May 13, 2025 – AT&T is expecting heightened competition for mobile broadband customers this year, despite the industry adding more mobile subscribers than expected in the first quarter of 2025.

“You’ve got a wireless market that’s fully penetrated. There’s a shrinking pool of growth in that regard,” AT&T COO Jeff McElfresh said Tuesday. “And so you have to earn that business probably differently than we did back in the early days.”

He spoke at a J.P. Morgan conference.

The big three 5G carriers and Comcast have indeed instituted new promotions in recent weeks and months, largely in the form of multi-year price locks, perks for taking bundled home and mobile broadband, and trade-in deals.

Although not all of those promotions were in effect long enough to affect the numbers, the mobile industry reported more net adds and switching than expected in the first quarter, analysts at New Street Research noted in a report last week. 

“Investors are wrestling with whether the market is healthy or whether the increase in activity reflects a pull-forward of activity from later in the year,” New Street analyst Jonathan Chaplin wrote.

That would mean customers who were going to switch carriers or sign up for a new plan anyway were motivated to do so earlier in the year, likely making the subscriber numbers later this year worse.

Chaplin said plausible explanations included fears of impending price increases due to tariffs, which wireless carriers have said would be passed on to consumers, or customers deciding to get in on the increasingly competitive promotional deals.

Regardless, “next quarter’s results won’t be conclusive,” he wrote. “If activity was pulled forward by fear of tariffs or by promotions, this will likely continue into 2Q25.”