MediaTalk | Season 3 | Ep. 44 -Fiber vs. Cable vs. Fixed Wireless: The Battle for Broadband Dominance in the Americas

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Mike Reynolds: Hi, I'm Mike Reynolds, a senior reporter covering the media industry with the S&P Global Market Intelligence tech, media, and telecom news team. Welcome to "MediaTalk," a podcast hosted by S&P Global, wherein the news and research staff explore issues in the ever-evolving media landscape. Today I'm joined by four S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan analysts: John Fletcher, who currently leads the Americas research team for broadband, multichannel video, and mobile towers. Lynette Luna is a senior research analyst who leads coverage of U.S. consumer mobile and tower markets. Research analyst Tomás Sarmiento covers Latin America's fixed broadband networks and pay TV, while research analyst Bruno do Amaral monitors the Latin American mobile market, including carriers, vendors, tower companies, and technologies. We're going to be discussing recent research all of the analysts conducted around mobile and broadband businesses here in the Western hemisphere.

How are you doing today, John?

John Fletcher: Doing great. Broadcasting to you live from my fixed wireless connection, and thanks for having me back. I think the last time we had this podcast, there was a tree in the way of my antenna for our fixed wireless, so I did a speed test. The last time I did this podcast, it was getting 25 Mbps, and I'm happy to report back that now that tree is gone. It's an astounding 45 Mbps.

Reynolds: Lynette, how about you? I don't know if your speed is that great, but how are you doing?

Lynette Luna: I'm well, thank you. I'm on fiber, so …

Fletcher: It might be a little faster.

Reynolds: Bruno and Tomás are making their inaugural "MediaTalk" appearances. How are you doing, Tomás? How's it going?

Tomás Sarmiento: Thank you very much. I'm also here from a fiber connection in Mexico City.

Reynolds: How about Bruno? How are you doing today?

Bruno do Amaral: I'm doing great, thanks. I'm not on fiber, but I'm on cable.

Reynolds: We're going to start with an overview of the Latin America and Caribbean mobile markets. John, can you just provide us an overview for Kagan's research on the subject here a little bit?

Fletcher: Yeah, what we decided to do is glue together the top eight countries in the Americas and compare the broadband and mobile markets into a beauty contest. And the yardsticks we use are subscribers, ARPU, revenue, and affordability metrics, and some other things. And the eight countries under purview are the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, and across those eight countries, that's the vast majority of the people that live in the Americas. There's a population of 880 million. And if you think of mobile phones, there's about 1 billion phones. So that's a mobile penetration of about 120%. So there are more phones and devices in use than people. And that's not the case for fixed broadband. I'm talking about cable, fiber, satellite, and fixed wireless. That's what most people refer to as home Wi-Fi. There are 243 million residential broadband customers across the 319 million households in those eight countries. So that's a penetration of only 76%. We think there's some room for growth there. We just finished the mobile version of this report, and the two takeaways that are more interesting to me are, yes, the U.S. is the largest by revenue and ARPU and subscribers, but the fastest growing market of those eight has been, and we think will continue to be, Peru in terms of both mobile and fixed home broadband.

Reynolds: Alright, Bruno, can you give us a little bit more about 2024 for the countries that you guys looked at? What kind of year was it? It was a good one, I think, right?

Do Amaral: Yeah. My research started from 11 countries that I used later for this Americas roundup. But from these 11 countries, we've seen some 2.3% annual growth, which is 15 million more. Net additions and total was 677 million subscriptions in 2024. From this total, 216 million were postpaid, which was already 3.1% growth compared to the previous year. And prepaid actually was the vast majority of this universe with more than 400 million subscriptions, and it's still growing.

Reynolds: Mexico is the largest prepaid market. Exactly.

Do Amaral: It's almost 83% of the market is prepaid in Mexico, which is pretty much most of Latin America's total too.

Reynolds: Bruno, if you can talk about what's the tower situation like in Latin America and the Caribbean?

Do Amaral: Sure. For this market, I've covered 28 countries, and we've seen more than 270,000 towers. And this total considers both traditional towers and the small cells in distributed antenna systems. This is already increased by 1.9% in 2023 to 2024. There were 231,000 traditional towers and about 39,000 small cells in DAS in the region.

Reynolds: Alright, I think in Kagan's breakdown of the mobile market share, Brazil and Mexico are on top as of June this year. If you can talk a little bit about that, and then were there some notable gains from any of the other countries in your research group?

Do Amaral: Yeah. Brazil and Mexico were by far the largest markets because combining these are 62% of the total subscriptions of these 11 markets covered. So we have Brazil with 39% of market share, followed by Mexico with 23%, Colombia, 12%, Argentina with 9%, Peru with 6%, and the rest are less than five and even less than 1%.

Reynolds: Latin America is still very much a prepaid-led market. Is this going to change as you look at this category? Is there still growth there, or what's the market look like that way?

Do Amaral: It's still growing. But in Brazil, we have this trend that operators are pushing for postpaid. That's something Brazil is by far the largest postpaid market in Latin America. But the problem is, there are more revenue opportunities in the postpaid than prepaid. I'm not sure if Mexico will still try to gain marketing prepaid, but we predict to still have low digit growth in the next seven years.

Reynolds: Alright, is 5G coming along, Bruno? Are there any barriers to that becoming a more adoptive standard?

Do Amaral: We have 5G in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico. About 72.4 million subscriptions in 2024. We expect that to change a lot in the next few years because every other country is already having spectrum auctions. But we also have a small problem, 5G is not growing as fast as they hoped for. Brazil had more than four years for 5G to hit 15 million subscriptions. And 4G only had 3.5 years.

Reynolds: Oh really?

Do Amaral: So it's growing at a slower pace already.

Reynolds: Let's take a look if you will. Who are the top corporate players in your space down there in Latin America, in terms of your research, which are the top companies?

Do Amaral: América Móvil, Entel, Liberty Latin America Ltd. , Millicom International Cellular SA , and Telefónica and Telecom Italia SpA But this is for 2024, right? Yes. Telefónica is exiting the market in most countries in Latin America. So by 2025, we'll see mostly América Móvil dominating the region with Millicom actually buying some of Telefónica's assets. So we'll see a different scenario next year.

Reynolds: Alright, Bruno, we appreciate you bringing us up to speed on mobile in Latin America. There we're gonna switch over to Lynette and like the Who song, we're also going mobile this time in the States. Lynette, can you give us a sense for a total postpaid phone market in the U.S.?

Luna: Yes, and we focus on postpaid phones because they are the highest revenue generators. So that's a metric that financial analysts really focus on. So at the end of 2024, we estimated that it reached more than 258 million. So that represents about 76% of the U.S. population. And we expect it to grow pretty slowly 'cause it's so saturated. Less than 1% from 2025 to 2035 to account for about 79% of the population.

Reynolds: I think John mentioned this at the top, there are more phones than people. Lynette, can you give us any sense for in the States here, people have how many lines?

Luna: That's a real focus for carriers is to continually add new services onto a postpaid plan. And so there's very heavy multi-line discounts for families. Individuals actually carry more than one phone, for business and for personal reasons. There's people migrating from prepaid to postpaid, that's a pretty aggressive move there for carriers like T-Mobile US Inc. , which allow customers to move from prepaid to postpaid if they paid their bill on time for a certain amount of time without a credit check. There's so many promotions with free iPhones and those prepaid customers are counted as new postpaid ads even though they're not new customers. And we also have MVNOs moving migration to postpaid phones as well.

Reynolds: The prepaid market has been in an up and down mode for the last few years. In which direction is it headed now?

Luna: It's pretty flat. Carriers really use it as an entry point for new customers or those who are not willing to pay for postpaid services to eventually migrate them and offer them new phones. Just to get more profitable customers on the postpaid side. So we expect that to grow at just 0.5% CAGR over the next decade.

Reynolds: Like Bruno had said earlier, they come with significantly lower ARPU than postpaid phone subscribers. So you see an ebb and flow with prepaid. If you're trying to say at the Christmas selling season, be aggressive and gain as many subscribers as possible. So certain quarters of the year you'll see some really good growth. And then others, there's a heavier focus on postpaid.

Reynolds: One thing I wanted to talk about I found interesting talking about wearables and tablets and IoT lines. More lines gonna help the business, right?

Luna: Yeah. The more you add to a postpaid plan, the more revenue you generate. Like I said, there's only so many phones you can sell. I just saw today that Verizon Communications Inc. 's the exclusive provider of the Meta Ray-Ban display glasses. So they're making a big deal out of that, but yes, we're gonna see a lot of wearables. Tablets have been around for a while, but we could see more aggressive movements on special deals on those. We have the direct device satellite lines. Right now they're included with a lot of plans, but I think as their capabilities grow, they could definitely be a separate charge there especially depending on what technology. Certain carrier uses, T-Mobile uses Starlink and then other carriers are gonna use different providers, so they're probably gonna have different capabilities,

Reynolds: Right?

Luna: So we expect about a CAGR of 8% from 2025 to 2035 for the segment. Growing to about 168 million by 2035. It'll be lower revenue per user. But if they can get aggressive on that, that should be a nice revenue boost for them.

Reynolds: So device iteration's a good thing for carriers?

Luna: Yes. We're also talking about services that go with these connected devices. Upsell such as insurance and managed services. Cross-selling premium connectivity lower churn. So it's not just measured in revenue per device, but there's also services that you can blend in that.

Reynolds: Alright, Bruno, we talked a little bit about 4G and 5G. What's the 5G story here in the U.S., Lynette?

Luna: Pretty much everything is 5G these days. 4G's kind of a backup for roaming.

Reynolds: Okay.

Luna: But it's pretty ubiquitous now.

Reynolds: How about wholesale subscriptions? We're talking about the cable companies here. What's your forecast in that arena?

Luna: That should be good growth, almost 3% CAGR during the next decade. And it's all because of cable MVNOs. We have Comcast Corp. , Charter Communications Inc. , Cox, and they're really aggressively increasing their subscriber lines and offering promotions and free phones. But then we also see new MVNOs coming up that were aggressive, but then carriers like to buy those companies just because they reach out to different segments of users that a carrier would not. So it muted the growth a little bit just because of that.

Reynolds: Lynette, can you just give us an overall sense for the mobile market in the U.S.?

Luna: Yeah. It's a mature market. We have three operators now. US Cellular was purchased by T-Mobile and I think that's all that they can handle. We saw EchoStar Corp. get out of the mobile business and just being MVNO, intense competition among the three, they're just moving customers back and forth. So it's, we'll see ARPU kind of moderate and slower service, revenue growth. It's just a mature market. It's becoming a utility going forward.

Reynolds: And in terms of total mobile subscriptions for those who like to scorecard.

Luna: Yeah, so they should grow from about 454 million in 2025 that we estimate to about 580 million by 2035. So that's a two and a half percent CAGR.

Reynolds: I gotcha. That's good stuff, right?

Luna: Yeah. Interesting. Interesting to see where the next wave of growth is going to come from.

Reynolds: We've talked 4G, 5G, and now 6G. When does that become a thing?

Luna: Oh, it usually is a 10-year cycle, so about by 2030. And I think instead of revolutionizing wireless networks like we saw with 5G, 6G will present more of an evolution using existing frequencies and much higher frequencies. So deliver a lot greater capacity and lower latency. And of course, we'll have a lot of AI elements to it. But it'll be similar to previous air interface technologies. You always want faster data speeds with lower latency.

Reynolds: We're gonna switch over to broadband now. John, can you give us a real top-line view here?

Fletcher: Yeah, absolutely. And just I'm surprised, Lynette, you didn't mention connected pets. I think that's gonna be a big growth driver, especially with 6G. I want to see what my cats are doing at night. They've been bringing back some weird animals in the morning.

Luna: I remember Japan counting pets as like the next generation of growth. But that was a decade ago. So maybe it'll be real now.

Reynolds: It'll be brought to you by Petco and Purina.

Fletcher: Not a bad idea. You heard it here first. So switching gears to fixed broadband. Yeah. We mentioned the four technology flavors. You got cable, fiber satellite, and fixed wireless. Again, the U.S. kind of dominates, crosses eight countries with about half of the 230 million subscriptions in the U.S. When we look at the penetration across all eight of those countries, the interesting thing to me was you have the mature markets, like Lynette was saying, the U.S. and then Canada too. They're getting close to a hundred percent penetration with broadband across homes. And on the other side of that extremity, you have Peru and Colombia, which are both below 50% penetration. And then the rest of the group is somewhere in the middle in terms of home broadband access. And I think I covered the U.S. and there's two interesting things I wanna bring up about the U.S. It's an odd market for two reasons. We're couch potatoes here. We rolled out cable TV in the seventies and the eighties. And then in the late nineties, someone at a cable operator figured out we could use that same coax for broadband. And voila, there's a new revenue stream, much higher margin revenue stream, right? And that early mover advantage is still having an impact on the market 25 years later. 60% of broadband subscriptions in the U.S. are still using cable. Fiber is around 20% in the U.S., which is unbelievably low. Most countries it's fiber dominated. Fiber is much higher across the world versus the U.S. because of that cable early entrance. The second weird thing is fixed wireless. And this is what Tomás teases me about a lot because you know this, in the U.S. it grew from a couple million subscriptions forever. And then T-Mobile and Verizon unlocked some spectrum around COVID time. A lot of naysayers at the time, and there still are some now. Tomás. The reality is 13% of broadband subscriptions in the U.S. are on fixed wireless. Just like me. But it's a U.S. only story for now. There are markets that have fixed wireless for sure, but it's a real small share. A lot of them don't have excess spectrum to try something like fixed wireless. It's relegated to connecting rural areas and used as a duplicate broadband backup. Another interesting thing with fixed wireless is businesses love it. If you look at fiber and cable, they'd be lucky to get 10% of their base with commercial or B2B customers. For fixed wireless, that number is almost 25%. So businesses are eating it up. And the good thing about business is that they pay a lot more. The ARPU are usually twice as much as the consumer ARPU. How it shakes out, just to throw some numbers out there, the U.S. at the end of the year, we think it's gonna have somewhere around 14 million. Fixed wireless Canada has 1 million. Brazil at 1 million and then everyone else in Latin America is, half a million or lower or just about. So it's still an anomaly specific to the U.S. for now, but I'm keeping my eye out.

Reynolds: Tomás, John referenced the early mover advantage for cable here in terms of broadband. Cable outside of the U.S. and Canada, where does that stand in terms of being the vehicle of choice?

Sarmiento: As part of the development, one of the things that we have seen in Latin America is that cable took the lead just before the pandemic hit as the main technology for residential broadband specifically. In Latin America, but it was overtaken by fiber. It has a lot to do with internet providers in Latin America. Reaching out to new markets that had very little coverage besides old-style copper DSL technology, which was inherited from analog telephone services in the last century. And those are being directly replaced with fiber. So it has been almost a direct jump from DSL to fiber with a very short interlude of cable dominating the sector.

Reynolds: Fiber is the player here then, right?

Sarmiento: Absolutely. It's already a technology of choice in the region. In most countries, it already has around 62% of the whole Latin American market.

Reynolds: Compared to the U.S., it's like 60% cable. Right, John?

Fletcher: Exactly.

Reynolds: So 180 from the U.S. side down to Latin America. I apologize, guys.

Sarmiento: Yeah, no, absolutely. But, and we are expecting that to grow even more. We're expecting fiber to get to over 70% across Latin America, not just the eight countries that we more recently checked, by 2031. As John said, countries like the U.S. and Canada have very wide distribution of cable since the last century and replacing that technology, which already serves a purpose. It's a lot. I imagine it's a harder proposition for them. Now, one of the things, and just to mention what John was mentioning regarding fixed wireless access, there was already around 10% of the U.S. market being fixed wireless access, in 2024, and they're expecting it to get to around 16 in seven years. By comparison, Mexico, which was the largest market in terms of subscribers in wireless access in the region. It had around 5% of the market in 2020, and that has been coming down to around 3% in 2024. We are expecting it to keep dropping in the future, not just in Mexico, but across Latin America.

Reynolds: Can you talk a little bit about things that are happening in Brazil and Peru specifically?

Sarmiento: Yeah. Those are really interesting cases in their own way, but they're very different. In the case of Brazil, the deployment of fiber has been helped basically by the emergence of a very large number of small and mid-sized internet service providers over the years. Some of them are national, some of them attend regional markets. Most of those companies have focused heavily on fiber because they're reaching smaller localities beyond São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasília. They're reaching smaller cities and increasing coverage there. So that's what has pushed ahead. Brazilian broadband connections. Brazil is a bit ahead in terms of residential broadband penetration. It was around 63.7% in 2025, while Latin America as a whole was at 56.7%.

Reynolds:

Sarmiento: In the case of Peru. This is a country that has a really complicated geography between the coastal zone, where big cities like Lima, which has about a quarter of the population as a country are the Andes and then the Amazon.com Inc. Basin. Since the pandemic forced people in urban centers to work from home and adopt residential broadband, it has grown at over 10% yearly from 2020 to 2024, much faster than other markets. Brazil, which was the second fastest growing broadband market in the region, grew at nearly 8% during that same period. And our observations put that growth for Peru at around 8% in the next seven years.

Reynolds: As you mentioned, all of those different geographies, I guess people really have to be innovative to get to the customers down there.

Sarmiento: Absolutely. In one of our latest collaborations with the regional team, we focused on those large six markets, comparing with the U.S. and Canada.

Reynolds: Yep.

Sarmiento: No, but one of the things that we're seeing is that growth for Latin America is likely to decelerate in the coming years because most of these countries are reaching levels of near saturation and saturation in Latin America is not the same as saturation in developed richer countries like Canada and the United States because in Latin America we have. At around 20% of the population living in poverty. So at some point, you have to choose, do you need a cell phone? And this is why Bruno and Lynette are talking about levels of penetration that go over a hundred percent easily. Right. In the region, and you need your mobile for work for. Constant communication that we are used to right now. But that doesn't mean you can't afford to have a cell phone and to have a home internet connection. So these levels of poverty have an influence in our broadband projections for the region. which is around 57% for 2025 right now, this is our residential broadband penetration estimation for the end of this year, and we're looking at about 62% for 2031. Because in some households, you have to make a choice between. Your cellphone connection and your broadband connection at home.

Reynolds: John, as you look out to 2031, Kagan estimates that broadband penetration will be virtually complete in Canada, like 99% I believe. U.S. at 98%, Argentina 82%, Chile 78%, Mexico 72%, Brazil 70%, Peru 60%, and Colombia 46%. Is that right?

Fletcher: Yeah, and it's really interesting because you mentioned the terrain differences. If you're in the Andes, it makes fixed wireless a little more difficult in some cases. And so painting a region with one single paintbrush is really difficult because not only you have mountains and trees that are different between countries, but you have demographic differences like Tomás was just bringing up. And I would add you have. Different regulators in every single country, and they all have a different approach to how to fix this problem. And they can snap their fingers and do something, or force the market to do something that makes them a unique outlier compared to their neighbors. So I think ultimately we do see broadband growth across the region. It just gonna depend on which country you're looking at. And yes, the U.S. is at 90% currently. That last 10 percent's not gonna be easy or cheap. I think we can get there with fixed wireless and satellite. I sure hope so. because my projections, assume so. And, broadband's a utility just like mobile. And at the top of the call, we talked about how mobile penetration's already over a hundred percent. And just because a market like the U.S. hits a hundred percent penetration with broadband doesn't mean there's an automatic hard stop there. There might be room for duplicate broadband connections for a home business, for example, that keeps that number growing even beyond that cap of a hundred percent. So yeah, we do see growth and it's just gonna be so specific to each area, which is why it's so important to have regional experts to guide you through each market individually,

Reynolds: Right? Tomás, what about in the other nations? Again, since the penetration levels are much lower opportunities lie ahead. Absolutely.

Sarmiento: You can see that in Peru. Broadband revenue grew by about 20% yearly between 2020 and 2024. And we expect that to be slower as you reach your market size, but still growing at around 6% in the next seven years, which regarding the comparison of these eight countries that we mentioned, we expect broadband revenue to grow around 4.2%, between 2025 and 2031 over the next seven years. But other countries are seeing. Slower growth than that. For example, in Colombia, which is one of the markets that has a small puzzle, because fixed broadband penetration, there seems to be growing at a much slower pace than the rest of the region. We're even projecting revenues to. Decrease a bit over the next few years. But yes, definitely we, there's still room to grow. But again, we mentioned income disparities we mentioned. The United States is a country with a gross national income per capita of around 85. Thousand dollars a year while Latin America is around 22. I don't think you can ever reach the levels of ARPU that you can reach in the states of Canada in the foreseeable future because it'll make, it will make it unaffordable for most of the population.

Reynolds: We're getting to the end here. I just wanted to give you guys a chance to sign off by saying, for the balance of 2025 and into 2026, what are you guys gonna be looking most closely at? Bruno? Can we start with you?

Do Amaral: Sure. I'm looking at some of the 5G and millimeter wave deployments, spectrum auctions, and M&A. Also curious about new regulators in Argentina and Mexico and how this will affect these markets.

Reynolds: Tomás, what's top of mind for you?

Sarmiento: One of the things that I'm going to be looking at over the next year or so is the redistribution of power and dominance between different operators. Currently in Latin America, the same as in mobile, in broadband América Móvil is the largest operator across the region, but there are new operators, or maybe not new operators, but operators that have been a bit more focused on certain regions, like for example, Millicom that are now coming into larger markets like Peru that are something to see if they can shake up the competition. Especially since Telefónica, with the exception of the Brazilian market, which is their second largest market. Telefónica is singing its swan song in the rest of Latin America leaving and we're looking at what's going to happen now with new operators coming in.

Reynolds: Alright, Lynette, your turn.

Luna: So for the rest of 2025, you know the big Christmas selling season is a big deal and just looking at a lot of the deals and how they make that final push in the fourth quarter. Going forward, there's issues with spectrum. Carriers need more spectrum. There's not a lot to be found. There has to be some sort of deal with the Department of Defense and right now they're far apart. For some of those frequencies that are appealing to commercial carriers. And just the evolution of these companies as they become mature companies. We saw two new CEOs are coming in, one in T-Mobile and one at Verizon. Dan Schulman at Verizon is more consumer platform focused, and that's what Verizon has really needed to compete in the consumer market.

Reynolds: All right. Last words to you, John.

Fletcher: I think the next two years for broadband, I see continued buzz and growth for both fixed wireless and LEO satellite. We didn't get too much into satellite in this conversation, Starlink has also been a disruptor in the last few years and brought the satellite space back to growth. Amazon's launched some satellites. They might come in. LEO satellite, that's low Earth orbit, is very inexpensive relative to the traditional satellite options out there. So with fixed wireless, adding a million new customers every quarter for the last two years, we're gonna see how long that can go for. I think that it does have a few more years, maybe two more years to keep going. At the same time, I do see some broadband price wars in the U.S. We're already seeing five and 10-year price locks from some operators.

Reynolds: Really? Wow.

Fletcher: Yeah, it was just wild and bundling where the buzzword now is convergence for mobile and fixed. But in terms of the customer, to have your fixed broadband operator and your mobile service from the same company. And I think entering stage left kinda randomly, I think there's gonna be video is gonna enter more into these bundling options too. A lot of these operators are bundling these streaming apps. Go figure, right? It all goes full circle now. And I think given our favorable regulatory landscape, I am expecting to see some more M&A in the U.S.

Reynolds: Some interesting parting thoughts from everybody. That concludes this episode of "MediaTalk." I wanted to thank our guests, Bruno, Lynette, Tomás, and John for sharing their time and their expertise. This is Mike Reynolds. Thanks to all of you for listening. We'll catch up soon on the next installment of "MediaTalk."