Why broadband providers can improve operationally and still lose competitive ground
Bill Wallet, Founder and CEO, Adoptex, LLC | October 2026 | Public Edition
This paper presents the market problem, its management implications, and why Adoptex created the Broadband Competitive Positioning System.
Are the improvements your company is making strengthening the reasons customers choose, trust, and remain with you, or only improving your operations?
1. THE WRONG QUESTION
Broadband is changing faster than most leadership teams revisit the assumptions their companies run on, and that speed is changing competitive position and company value. It also makes one of the industry’s most familiar management questions less useful than it looks: Are we improving?
Most well-run providers are improving. They are adding capacity, increasing speeds, strengthening reliability, revising offers, automating work, and investing in people, and those accomplishments matter. They do not answer the full competitive question.
Operating improvement and competitive position are two different measurements. Improvement shows up on the company’s own dashboards. Competitive position shows up only in the customer’s decision, where the company is compared against every other provider the customer can order at that address. A network can be faster and more reliable than it was last year, and a customer will still compare it against a fixed wireless or fiber offer that was not available to them twelve months ago. A price can be lower than a competitor’s, and a customer will still choose the provider that fixed their last outage in one call. The company improved. The customer’s alternatives improved more.
The gap between improving and winning matters now because customers’ alternatives are changing faster than the assumptions behind most budgets, build schedules, and pricing decisions. The Federal Communications Commission reports that the share of Americans with three or more fixed terrestrial providers offering 100/20 Mbps rose from 27.8 percent in June 2023 to 43.4 percent in June 2025, so customer choice expanded by more than half in two years. A budget or build plan set in January 2023 on the belief that the market was a two-provider contest was wrong within the year.
A provider can be improving, and still be losing ground.
Fiber deployment, satellite performance, fixed wireless, mobile convergence, overbuilding, pricing, and customer expectations are changing at the same time, not in sequence. A company can stay on budget and on build schedule while the assumptions underneath both expire.
2. THE MARKET IS ALREADY MOVING
As of June 2025, 77 percent of Americans had access to at least three fixed services offering 100/20 Mbps when satellite is counted. Availability is not adoption, and national figures do not establish what is orderable at a specific address, but “no alternative” is no longer a defensible planning assumption for 77 percent of the country.
Fixed wireless is taking the growth. T-Mobile and Verizon fixed wireless together accounted for 101 percent of the roughly 3.6 million net broadband additions in the United States over the year ending in the third quarter of 2025, which means every other category lost subscribers in aggregate. Customers are not treating fixed wireless as a fallback: J.D. Power’s 2026 study scored wireless internet satisfaction at 645 on a 1,000-point scale against 560 for wired.
Fiber is overbuilding fiber. The Fiber Broadband Association reports that fiber passed more than 60 percent of U.S. households by the end of 2025, and about 16 percent of fiber-passed homes already have two or more fiber providers, a share that itself grows about 16 percent annually. Where a second fiber provider enters, average fiber take rises from 46.5 percent on a single passing to about 61 percent for the market, so competition grows the category and contests the incumbent’s share at the same time. Being first bought time. It did not buy protection.
The largest operators are expanding on more than one front. AT&T reached 38.6 million fiber locations as of June 2026 and expects more than 60 million by the end of 2030. Verizon ended 2025 with more than 5.7 million fixed-wireless subscribers and, after closing its acquisition of Frontier in January 2026, holds a fiber footprint above 30 million homes and businesses. T-Mobile ended 2025 with close to 8 million 5G home internet customers and raised its target to 15 million by 2030.
The question is not whether every alternative wins everywhere. It is how quickly an alternative becomes credible enough for a customer to compare it against the current provider.
3. STARLINK REMOVES FALSE COMFORT
For most of the past decade, an independent provider could treat satellite broadband as the option a household accepted when nothing else reached the address. That description no longer holds, and the evidence for retiring it comes from independent measurement rather than from SpaceX.
Starlink is credible now. It entered the American Customer Satisfaction Index 2026 study at 76, equal to the fiber segment average and above every cable operator. Ookla found that the share of Starlink users meeting the FCC’s 100/20 Mbps benchmark more than doubled in one year, from 18.9 percent to 40 percent, and the number of states where at least half of Starlink users met that benchmark went from zero to 17.
Starlink is improving fast. SpaceX reports adding more than 5 terabits per second of capacity each week and deployed its first third-generation satellites in September 2026. Those are company figures and describe capacity growth rather than a measured customer result, but the growth they describe matches what Ookla measured.
Starlink is expanding its role into mobile. On October 8, 2026, SpaceX announced a definitive agreement to acquire up to 14 MHz of paired 800 MHz spectrum nationwide from Grain Management. The transaction is pending FCC approval, and SpaceX has not said when service backed by it will reach customers, but its stated purpose is specific: “This prime low-band spectrum addresses one of the key remaining technical gaps that will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US.” The purchase sits on top of 65 MHz of mid-band spectrum SpaceX is acquiring from EchoStar, and in the same week of October 2026, SpaceX received FCC approval to launch 15,000 satellites built for 2 GHz spectrum. Shares of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile fell on October 8 because investors repriced three national carriers on where Starlink is heading, not on a service that has customers, a launch date, or regulatory approval.
The evidence also shows what Starlink is not. Its all-hours U.S. median in early 2026 was 127 Mbps download and 21 Mbps upload, against a U.S. household median of 305/58 Mbps. Performance varies by location, and reported availability does not establish capacity at a specific address. Starlink is a credible and improving alternative, and it is not a fiber equivalent at this time.
The false comfort lives in the space between “credible alternative” and “fiber equivalent.” “Starlink cannot replace us” is true for many households today, and it is the wrong test. The test that governs competitive position is for which households, businesses, and uses Starlink has already become a reason to compare, and how fast that group is growing. The pace and commercial form of Starlink’s next phase are uncertain. Its trajectory toward mobile and higher capacity is not.
4. THE OSTRICH EFFECT
In conversations with broadband leaders, I rarely meet an executive who does not know the market is changing. More often, they are consumed by operating the business: construction, outages, staffing, vendors, budgets, board demands, and the daily needs of customers.
I call what follows the Ostrich Effect, a term I apply to a specific management condition observed in those conversations. The Ostrich Effect is the substitution of operating activity for competitive awareness: market change is visible to leadership, but its consequences for competitive position are deferred again and again because something more immediate always demands attention. The company is not idle; it may be busy and improving, which is why the Ostrich Effect is hard to recognize from inside. It is not ignorance, and it is not the behavioral-finance habit of avoiding bad news. The executive sees the change and the company does not act on what the change means for its position.
Stable results can coexist with competitive weakening because the customer’s decision begins long before the disconnect. A customer can stay connected while becoming less confident in the provider, more responsive to another offer, and more willing to switch when the right alternative arrives, and through all of that the subscriber count and recurring revenue look unchanged. Churn reports the outcome only after reconsideration has gone far enough for the customer to act.
Investors showed the alternative on October 8, 2026, when they repriced three national carriers within hours of a spectrum announcement that has no customers and no launch date. An operating company that filed the same announcement under “mobile, not our business” was displaying the Ostrich Effect.
For an independent provider, the Ostrich Effect shows up as weaker take rates, heavier retention discounting, slower growth, or deteriorating economics in established markets. For an aggregator, the same blind spot can exist across a portfolio, where consolidated results hide different local threats and customer perceptions. Scale improves purchasing and shared services; it does not make local competitive movement uniform. Section 9 gives seven questions that test whether the Ostrich Effect is present in your own company.
5. NECESSARY IS NOT DISTINCTIVE
Availability, speed, and price still matter, because they are the conditions for entering and staying in the customer’s consideration set. Where several providers are available, fast enough, and competitively priced, those three attributes become easy to compare and hard to own as durable differentiation.
Pricing shows why. USTelecom’s 2026 Broadband Pricing Index found that inflation-adjusted prices for the most popular 100 to 940 Mbps services fell 6.0 percent in 2025 and are down 43.6 percent since 2014. A discount that competitors can match changes the transaction without strengthening preference.
Speed works the same way. Once the connection supports what the customer uses it for, consistency, in-home coverage, understandable billing, and effective problem resolution matter more than another increase in the headline tier. J.D. Power stated the conclusion directly in its 2026 study of 31,548 customers: reliable connectivity is now a baseline expectation rather than a defining competitive advantage. That finding comes from customers, not from a provider’s marketing department.
Availability, speed, and price remain necessary. In a market of credible alternatives, they are no longer sufficient.
6. EVERY INTERACTION IS COMPETITIVE
A founding Adoptex principle is that every interaction an ISP has with its market, prospects, and customers either strengthens or weakens its competitive position. Competitiveness is not created only by the network, the sales team, or customer care; it is created, or surrendered, through the complete relationship. A prospect judges that relationship through reputation, search results, offer clarity, and the sales conversation. A customer judges it through installation, Wi-Fi, reliability, outage communication, billing, support, and how the provider responds when something goes wrong.
Customers experience one provider, not separate departments. J.D. Power measures ISP satisfaction across seven dimensions: consistently delivering high-quality service, value for price paid, ease of doing business, trust, people, digital tools, and resolving problems. Those categories are separate inside the company and cumulative in the customer’s judgment, and the 2026 study measured how cumulative: when a complication arose during digital issue resolution, satisfaction among wired customers fell 167 points, from 625 to 458. One failed interaction erased 167 points of goodwill, and no network upgrade in the same study moved satisfaction that far.
Research on customer journeys shows the same danger from the other direction. McKinsey described an onboarding journey in which every individual interaction had at least a 90 percent chance of going well, yet satisfaction fell almost 40 percent across the complete journey. Each touchpoint looked healthy. The relationship was not.
Because those interactions span the entire company, measuring any fragment of them cannot measure the company’s complete competitive position.
7. ACTIVITY IS NOT PROGRESS
Broadband providers have no shortage of initiatives. They deploy infrastructure, change plans, redesign offers, automate support, and adopt AI tools, and completion proves that work occurred without proving that competitive position improved. A promotion can produce gross additions while weakening economics after the introductory period. Automation can reduce handling time while increasing customer effort. A product expansion can increase choice while making the offer harder to understand.
AI deployments show the difference between completion and progress in measurable form. A field experiment covering 256,934 customer chats, summarized by Harvard Business School, found that AI-assisted agents responded 22 percent faster and improved customer sentiment, but the gains varied by what the customer needed and were weaker for repeat complaints. Deploying the tool was not the achievement. Resolving the customer’s problem was.
An initiative becomes competitive progress only when it changes customer consideration, selection, experience, trust, recommendation, retention, willingness to pay, or the business performance those behaviors produce. Without evidence of that change, leadership knows the activity was completed and does not know whether the company became more competitive.
8. THE COST OF SEEING IT LATE
Network reports show infrastructure performance, sales reports show acquisition, churn shows departures, and financial statements show business results. Each answers an important question after the fact. None of them, by itself, establishes whether customer preference is strengthening or weakening before the outcome appears.
Current results can be propped up for a time by switching inconvenience, promotional retention, expansion into new territory, or customers’ uncertainty about alternatives. Those factors preserve revenue and subscriber counts while the underlying relationship becomes more fragile.
The risk is a matter of timing. Market movement comes first, then customer reconsideration, then operating deterioration, then financial consequences. Waiting for churn, revenue decline, or valuation pressure asks lagging results to reveal a problem that customers recognized earlier.
That leaves every leadership team with one question. Can we tell, before churn and revenue tell us, whether we are becoming more or less likely to win customer choice against every credible alternative in our markets? If the honest answer is no, the company has reports about operations, finance, network quality, and customer activity, and no way to manage its competitive position. For an independent ISP, that threatens take rate, network returns, and the value of a locally trusted position. For an aggregator, it undermines underwriting assumptions and forecast confidence across acquired systems.
9 QUESTIONS WORTH DISCUSSING NOW
These are the questions leadership should be willing to answer before lagging indicators answer them on leadership’s behalf.
- Which competitive assumptions behind the current budget and build schedule would no longer be true if a credible alternative improved faster than expected?
- Which assumptions still treat satellite as a broadband-only, rural, last-resort option?
- Where are customers being retained because they prefer the provider, and where might they remain because switching still feels inconvenient?
- Which interactions most strongly affect whether prospects consider the provider and whether customers trust, recommend, and remain with it?
- Which current initiatives can demonstrate a change in customer behavior or business performance rather than completion alone?
- For a portfolio, which local markets are strengthening, holding, or weakening beneath the consolidated result?
- What would leadership want to know today if churn and revenue will not make the movement obvious until later?
They are not questions to hold for the next budget or board cycle. If they expose uncertainty, or disagreement among the leaders answering them, that disagreement is itself a measurement of how the company sees its own position.
The gaps are real, the time is now, competitiveness will never stop changing…
WHY THE BROADBAND COMPETITIVE POSITIONING SYSTEM EXISTS
Competitive position changes as alternatives improve, prices move, and customers accumulate experience with every provider serving their market. The evidence in this paper shows that the pace of that change now outruns the way most companies review their position; assumptions set in January can describe a competitive map that no longer exists by summer. Conventional management information was not designed for a market that moves faster than those assumptions are revisited, and a company can hold a dashboard for every department and still have no measurement of its complete competitive position.
Adoptex’s research found no instrument that answered the question. No integrated management discipline existed to measure an ISP’s ongoing competitive position from the outside in, across every interaction that shapes whether a customer chooses, trusts, recommends, and remains. Adoptex created the Broadband Competitive Positioning System (BCPS) to close that gap.
BCPS measures competitiveness across ten pillars: Market Position, Sales and Growth, Product Portfolio, Network Capability, Service Operations, Customer Experience, Artificial Intelligence, Security and Resilience, Business Performance, and Governance. Every factor is defined by what the market, prospects, and customers can see, hear, experience, or infer about the provider, not by what the provider believes about itself. BCPS makes competitiveness an ongoing leadership responsibility, with recurring measurement, accountability assigned by position, and decisions, rather than an occasional review. It is the measurement discipline inside Ongoing Competitive Navigation, the management discipline Adoptex created around it.
The factors beneath each pillar, the ISP-specific questionnaires, scoring, cadence, and navigation process are proprietary to Adoptex and are not published here.
Starlink and the broader market are not asking whether your ISP has a plan. They are asking whether you can compete and win as the customer’s choices expand, and answering that requires knowing, not assuming, whether your competitive position is strengthening or weakening across every interaction that shapes preference. No fragmented dashboard, isolated benchmark, network score, or customer-experience program can answer that complete question. BCPS was created because broadband leaders needed the first complete, ongoing discipline that can.
ABOUT THIS PAPER
This paper draws on published market and customer research and on Bill Wallet’s conversations with broadband leaders. Every market figure is documented, with primary-source links, in the companion Source Notes and Verification document, available on request. The Ostrich Effect as defined here and the interpretations in this paper are the author’s original conclusions.
Bill Wallet is the founder and CEO of Adoptex, an independent research company that measures the competitive position of broadband providers. Adoptex created the Broadband Competitive Positioning System and the Ongoing Competitive Navigation discipline. Adoptex measures and reports; it does not provide consulting, implementation, or technology sales. To discuss how these conditions apply to your ISP or portfolio, contact Bill Wallet on LinkedIn or at adoptex.ai.
Posted by GLDS with permission from Adoptex.ai © 2026 Adoptex LLC. All rights reserved.
