First with Fiber Wins Broadband and Mobile
Service providers are recognizing the power and value of fiber to win and retain subscribers in competitive markets of all shapes and sizes, as well as unlocking economic value for businesses of all sizes. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have and continue to invest heavily into fiber, and it is paying significant dividends in terms of being able to give business and residential customers what they want in terms of reliability, low-latency, and high-speed, easily scalable broadband when they need it.
AT&T’s successful fiber strategy
AT&T, which first reported the beneficial synergies of fiber with mobile earlier this year, had topped its broadband subscriber estimates when it provided its 3Q financial report at the end of October 2025. More than 41% of AT&T fiber households took mobile plans, reported CNBC.
The fiber-mobile bundle also increases customer retention rates for the carrier, which leads to increasing mobile subscription rates. In May 2025, Bernstein financial analysts said AT&T has maintained the lowest postpaid churn in the industry, boosted by bundling and device upgrade plans, stating “Without these two effects (fiber/bundle contribution and best-in-class churn), net [customer] adds would have been close to zero or negative. AT&T’s fiber business is one of the key reasons it is able to achieve healthy net adds when compared to peers.”
Challenges for traditional broadband providers
Meanwhile, third quarter 2025 financial reports from Charter and Comcast continue to show steady declines in their broadband subscribers, with Charter’s CEO Chris Winfrey saying that competition for new customers “remains high” from both fiber and fixed wireless access. Comcast subscribers have dropped for the 10th straight quarter, reports the Wall Street Journal, with the broadband environment described as “intensively competitive.”
Consumer preferences for fiber
Research conducted by RVA LLC across multiple years shows that consumers prefer fiber over all other broadband options for its ability to deliver maximum performance with no limitations, unlike the installation and dependability issues that enter the chat with legacy copper, cable, fixed wireless, and satellite. The research goes on to project that fiber will become the leading Internet delivery method to American homes by 2030 as customers migrated away from DSL and HFC networks.
We know from anecdotal statements and our own discussions with the fixed wireless and cable communities that forward-thinking operators are steadily moving to fiber. WISPA spokespeople have stated that about a third of the wireless association’s members have installed fiber to deliver services, complementing and supplementing their existing broadband technologies. Fiber provides wireless ISPs (WISPs) with more reliable and plentiful bandwidth than even the most sophisticated RF-based solutions today. Deploying fiber to established customers also allows WISPs to redeploy more expensive radio equipment to new customers and markets, enabling them to expand operations in an ever-growing cycle.
Fiber also provides the steady and unlimited backbone for current and future wireless operations, supporting today’s gigabit-class radios and emerging 20 gigabit point-to-point laser connections for enterprise and MDU deployments. On the 5G side, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon continue to rely on fiber to expand and enhance their respective wireless footprints throughout the country.
The all-fiber solution in the cable industry
Within the cable community, an all-fiber network is already the go-to solution for operators in “greenfield” areas where they don’t already have preestablished infrastructure and in edge-out expansion where they have existing HFC infrastructure presences and are extending service to neighboring areas.
And CableLabs, the research arm of the cable industry, is investing considerable time and effort into fiber to maximize its speed and efficiency. At SCTE TechExpo25, CableLabs President and CEO Phil McKinney said the group had demonstrated 50,000 gigabits per second over a single strand of fiber “you already have in the ground.”
Who needs more than 100 Mbps? Certainly, that’s been the battle cry of naysayers who fixate on short-term cost over long-term economic and social potential, but entrepreneurs and forward-thinkers always find ways to use more broadband to maximize profits and their time.
Success stories highlighting fiber’s impact
Down in rural Texas, Starfront Observatories hosts hundreds of telescopes from around the world, enabling amateur astronomers to view the heavens each night in near-perfect viewing conditions. Business is booming for Starfront, with over 600 customers to date supported by 5 Gbps of dedicated fiber services from the local phone cooperative. It’s a business that wouldn’t exist without fiber, since satellite services don’t have the upstream bandwidth to support the gigabytes and terabytes of imaging data per night flowing from the telescopes to hobbyists around the globe.
Nobody likes to wait for their cloud services, regardless of profession, with small businesses especially sensitive to delays. The next time you go to a wedding or other formal social event, find the onsite photographer and ask them how much data they collect from the two to three cameras they are lugging around. They will tell you that they need to quickly load data onto a cloud service and use AI to clean up images before they send the bride and groom a link to the photos.
AI and the future of fiber connectivity
AI is the next frontier, driving higher speeds and substantial benefits. In New Zealand, there’s a cherry farm that uses a 25G PON connection to rapidly send 400,000 high-resolution pictures per hour to the cloud for rapid AI analysis, enabling the orchard owner to quickly identify the ripeness and quality of the fruit. Being able to pick the cherries at the peak of freshness opens the ability to nearly triple the farm’s harvest in the future, resulting in significant financial gain.
The power of fiber is driving the growth of agentic AI across industries, with the telecommunications industry set to be among the first to benefit in the years to come. Service providers will be leveraging the untapped potential of nearly unlimited bandwidth to deploy zero-touch networks that automatically adjust themselves and fix problems without human intervention, delivering new and better services at lower cost.
Believe it or not, we’re only just starting to unlock the full potential of fiber. It’s fair to say that any service provider who has or is investing in fiber today will continue to see the benefits of the technology for themselves, their investors, and their customers for years and decades to come.
Gary Bolton
President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association
Gary Bolton serves as president and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association—the largest trade association dedicated to all-fiber-optic broadband. Prior to FBA, Gary held executive management positions at two successful venture-backed high-tech start-ups as well as at large publicly traded companies in marketing, product line management and public policy. Gary is also currently an adjunct professor in business administration and management science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and he holds an MBA from Duke University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University.
Images, Shutterstock
