AT&T’s entry into the modern fixed-wireless access (FWA) market has resulted in a lukewarm response, which despite ongoing competition from rivals appears to be a model AT&T remains committed to.

AT&T CEO John Stankey said the carrier signed up 25,000 customers to its recently launched Internet Air product during the carrier’s third fiscal quarter. This in turn boosted AT&T’s overall net broadband growth into positive territory with 15,000 net subscriber additions in Q3.

"We've been pleased with the positive early reception," Stankey said of its FWA service.

Despite those positive attributes, Stankey did maintain his conservative tone toward the service.

“We view this service as yet another tool in our productivity toolbox,” Stankey said during AT&T’s Q3 earnings call. “While it will primarily act as a targeted catch product we've been pleased with the positive early reception.”

AT&T’s approach to FWA is significantly different than that of rivals Verizon and T-Mobile US. Those two operators have both been more committed to their FWA efforts, which have, in turn, resulted in substantial growth.

Verizon said it added 384,000 FWA connections during the second quarter, which was down slightly from what it reported during Q1, but a 50% increase from what it added during the second quarter of 2022. The carrier counted nearly 2.3 million FWA customers at mid-year, which was nearly halfway to its target of up to 5 million FWA customers at the end of 2024.

T-Mobile US added 509,000 FWA connections to its High-Speed Internet (HSI) service during its most recent second quarter, pushing the carrier’s total FWA connection base to 3.7 million. That puts the carrier at the mid-point of the 7 million to 8 million FWA connections it said it can support based on excess capacity it has on its 5G network.

Mobile Experts recently reported there were now more than 100 mobile operators offering some form of 5G-based FWA service, compared to around 60 just two years ago. The research firm also reported that FWA connections surpassed more than 100 million at the end of last year, with that number set to hit 257 million connections by 2028.

Stankey did note that FWA is acting as a financial driver for the operator in the enterprise market.

“Given what businesses pay for broadband and the other incremental services you can layer on top of them that allows them to have a higher take rate or a higher ARPU [average revenue per user] and their usage characteristics that makes the profitability of serving the product in that segment different than it is in say a consumer household with four people streaming video all day long,” Stankey said. “So we will continue to find opportunities to do that.”

This aligns with previous comments from Alicia Dietsch, SVP of business marketing for AT&T, who recently told SDxCentral that 5G-powered FWA was increasingly becoming a fallback option for enterprise customers, including for use as an alternative connection method for SD-WAN services or as an “interim” high-speed broadband connection for fiber.

“In the right situations we would advance FWA as a recommended solution to the customer,” Dietsch said.

Those recommendations should be increasing as AT&T looks to counter an exodus of customers paying for legacy wireline services. That outflow resulted in a nearly 8% year-over-year drop in business wireline revenues for AT&T.

“The most significant impact that is occurring in the fixed wireline business is what I will call the secular change of technology,” Stankey said of that challenge. “It's the managed complex networking shift toward SDN, which means the provisioning of raw bandwidth and using software. There's an effectiveness and efficiency issue that comes on with that. You may keep a customer, you continue to do business with a customer, but you don't shift that technology dollar for dollar.”

The exec did add that enterprise customers are starting to understand the importance of wireless technology as a “strategic frontier of how they engineer their processes and their company.”

“I'm actually pretty bullish that what we saw in the early days of VPN, where managed networks and manage capabilities and support and capabilities on complex networks were a big growth cycle in enterprise customers, I think we're going to see the same thing start to emerge on the wireless side. I think that’s just going to be growth,” Stankey said. “When we have the presence we do in these large customers, the fact that we're calling on them with one set of services and we can sell both sets of services, is really important for us despite some of the secular headwinds we're taking and the technology shipped out on the fixed side.”