Practical Advice for Small Fiber ISPs

Smart, impactful and budget-friendly actions to grow your business

David Gray

July 23, 2025

Marketing leaders and CROs at small- and mid-sized ISPs have a tough assignment. They’ve got small teams and they’re focused on achieving aggressive net gain and EBITDA targets, which are often elusive given limited consumer awareness of a new brand, constrained marketing budgets, and a changing competitive landscape. Growth in the broadband industry has slowed in recent years as the market has become more saturated and as new household formation has slowed. In order to avoid competing directly with other wireline broadband providers, increasingly FTTH providers are focusing upon more rural and less densely-populated markets, which introduces new challenges. In order for ISPs’ marketing to be as effective as it can be, it’s important that those who are tasked with driving growth are working to get the most from their GTM plans, fully exploiting local opportunities, and regularly assessing their execution to ensure that their marketing programs are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Slowing industry growth

The end of 2020 – the winter following the initial COVID outbreak in the United States – was the high-water mark for broadband growth in the United States. More Americans – including many who had previously gotten by with only a smartphone connection – found that they required good connectivity to simply live and to function in the midst of the pandemic. By the second half of 2020, ISPs were experiencing a steady diet of subscriber connects offset only with scant disconnect volume; in these days residential household move activity had essentially stopped, and most telecoms had significantly relaxed their collections policies. This resulted in a period of exceedingly low customer churn. In the Spring of 2021 the federal government began the process of distributing more than $17B in consumer broadband subsidies through programs including the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) and later the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which were specifically aimed at keeping Americans connected to broadband.

Since this peak period, there’s been a steady deceleration in the rate of growth across the industry. Pew Research reports that 79% of U.S. adults now subscribe to home broadband. The fact that some 5M households are estimated to have cut internet services following the termination of the ACP last June suggests that the market for paid broadband service is far more saturated than it was a few years ago.

According to the Census bureau, new household formation has ranged between 0.8% - 1.5% annually for the last decade. This is significant because expansion of new households has for decades been a reliable driver of broadband subscriber growth – it's a rising tide that lifts all boats. Absent a strong lift from new household formation, however, individual providers need to compete for existing households.  (And it’s important to note that current forecasts call for a reduced rate of new household formation in the next 10 years; Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies projects that the U.S. will add new households at a notably slower growth rate than in the past three decades.)

In 2023 and 2024, the industry’s growth rate was dragged down by cable, which lost broadband customers during this period. Additionally, relative to other providers the MSOs experienced disproportionate impact from the termination of the ACP in June 2024. According to MoffettNathanson (“U.S. Broadband: Why Cox Bought Charter, and Other Questions from Q1” June 2, 2025) total broadband industry growth – including cable, fiber, fixed wireless and GEO satellite – has been slowing for several years. In Q1 2025 YoY overall industry growth slowed from to 1.4% – down from 2.3% prior year.

While fiber’s growth has continued to outpace the overall industry its growth rate has also slowed. MoffettNathanson estimates the YoY growth for fiber – including large telcos and independent FTTH providers – declined to 10.0% in Q1 2025 from 10.8% prior year.

FTTH providers are increasingly looking to more rural and less densely-populated areas to expand into, which makes good sense. There tend to be less wireline competitors in these geographies, where the prospects for generating greater market share are improved. But it costs more to build plant and to operate where there are fewer homes per mile. Marketing effectively can be more challenging in such areas, given lower USPS address quality scores, less precise market segmentation, higher vacancy rates, and higher seasonality given the potential for more partial-year residents in some areas. Direct sales programs can also be harder in these areas in terms of logistics, efficiency, staffing/recruiting, training and quality assurance. Quite often, ISPs find that their GTM programs which always seemed to get the job done in more densely-populated urban and suburban areas need to be reworked considerably in less densely populated areas.

Evolving competitive landscape

In the last five years, T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T each launched their own fixed wireless access Home Internet services, effectively exploiting excess network capacity, and these providers quickly grew their collective subscriber base from zero to nearly 13M customers. Since 2023 FWA has generated more net additions in the U.S. than any other broadband platform. Marketed with attractive pricing for existing wireless customers, for many consumers – particularly younger ones – FWA offers a simple, convenient, and self-installed solution that many users consider “fast-enough” for their needs.

It's important to note that FWA growth is not limited to urban or suburban markets — the carriers have invested in reaching less densely populated communities where traditional wired infrastructure may or may not be present.

And the product deemed by many users to be “fast enough” has actually been getting faster. FWA services have been increasing download speeds; in March, Ookla reported that T-Mobile’s FWA median download speeds increased more than 50% (to 205.44 Mbps) in 2024 and that Verizon’s increased its by 12% to 150.47 Mbps during the same period.

Consistent with overall industry trends, FWA net additions have also decelerated over the last two years, but nevertheless as a category fixed wireless continues to be the largest share-taker in the industry, having added more than 8.5M customers since 2022.

A Cable comeback?

Cable may be positioning to fight its way back to subscriber growth after a couple of challenging years of broadband losses. Both Comcast and Charter are aggressively leveraging their MVNO agreement with Verizon and have been aggressively promoting a converged Mobile + Broadband offer which features a free Unlimited Mobile line for a full year. This offer has proven quite disruptive, because it saves consumers $700 or more in mobile fees when they switch from other carriers, and according to the companies this approach has helped to curb customer churn. Today Comcast and Charter have more than 19M mobile lines (which is approximately 19M more than they had in 2017) and they now routinely outpace the MNOs in terms of quarterly line growth. Once the Cox/Charter merger closes, nearly 90% of U.S. households will have access to both Mobile service and broadband download speeds up 1Gbps or more from either Comcast or Cox/Charter.

Cable is also preparing to increase its broadband speeds. Last month Cable Labs hosted its Interop-Labs conference, where the key takeaway is that the DOCSIS 4.0 platform is now expected to deliver Internet speeds of up to 14 Gbps downstream using existing cable plant; this far exceeds previous expectations.

Starlink also becoming more competitive – particularly in rural areas

According to Ookla, Starlink’s median download speeds have nearly doubled from 53.95 Mbps in Q3 2022 to 104.71 Mbps in Q1 2025; upload speeds have also been meaningfully improved. Additionally, the LEO satellite provider is giving free gear to new customers in areas where it has excess capacity. (And of course the company stands to benefit from recent changes to the BEAD program.)

Practical Marketing Advice and Insights

Please don't do this.

Last week I attended an event presented by the Fiber Broadband Association that addressed how fiber ISPs can improve their marketing programs. Doug Adams, CMO of Broadband Marketers, and Steve Riat, Director of Sales at Nex-Tech, focused on practical actions that small providers can take to improve their marketing and steps they can take to avoid commoditizing their service. They caution providers against simply boiling down their offering to price and speed – good marketing should always be about promoting consumer benefits.  They point out that speed and price are merely product features, which are replicable and potentially beatable. But striving to create a benefit-based relationship with customers can create loyalty.

Specifically, they warn marketers to avoid the “Broadband as a Utility” trap, which is assuming that all consumers innately know that they need broadband, like they require water or electricity. This approach overlooks important questions many consumers are actually pondering:

· Can I stream without buffering, enhance my lifestyle and/or save money on cable TV?

· Can I easily receive the content my family wants, including sports?

· Can I video conference and work from home?

· Can my kids access better education opportunities easily?

· How will a faster (and possibly more expensive) service deliver value to my life?

· Isn't all internet the same? What's the difference between 1 Mbps and 100 Mbps?

· For small business owners: What does my business need today -- and in the future?

As small fiber providers are now expanding into less densely populated rural areas, it’s important to acknowledge that consumers in these markets have lived for years without broadband services. Many are content without a fiber attached to their house today – they’re accustomed to life with DSL or only a mobile connection. These households tend not to include heavy gamers focused on latency, and they’re not regularly streaming most of their content or routinely uploading massive files. Broadband marketing in these areas can therefore be a heavier lift, Adams explains. Here, marketers may find they need to go back to basics. For example, they should consider offering free workshops at the ISP’s office or the local library to educate consumers about how they can easily do many things that just make life better with a fast broadband connection.

Riat recommends marketers get in the practice of regularly producing 2 minute videos and posting them to social media. With minimal effort and a bit of experience, it can be quick, easy and cost-effective to develop compelling and relevant content which advances your brand’s story and which drives engagement with consumers. He suggests, for example, featuring the local head of engineering explaining the process of preparing for a new construction phase, and demonstrating that yours is a local company focused on serving your community. Feature “day in the life” ride-along videos with service techs or sales reps, showing recognizable locations familiar to residents.

Adams points out that established incumbents – the telcos and MSOs – have vast marketing budgets which fund heavy advertising programs, programmatic SEO strategies, major sponsorships, and sophisticated direct marketing and direct sales programs. In order to compete effectively, smaller providers need to work at cultivating a brand which resonates with consumers at the local level. “Don’t fight them where they’re at,” he says, referring to the telcos and MSOs. “You don’t need to be on TV or the radio. You don’t need SEO.” Instead, he recommends providers lean into becoming effective storytellers about being part of the local community. Show up at local pancake breakfasts. Have a booth at farmer’s markets, at Little League games and high school football games. Establish an authentic and meaningful local presence.

This perspective resonates with me. I’ve spent much of my career directing localized competitive strategy at large MSOs. On more than one occasion my CMO cautioned me about trying to “out-local the locals” – his point being that local providers who effectively embed themselves in the community can substantively engender brand affinity and customer loyalty, and it can be quite be difficult for large cable companies and telcos to accomplish the same across their massive footprints. I’ve seen many small and regional providers who are quite adept at playing this local card effectively and authentically, but not all do. Marketing leaders and CROs of small ISPs should take a critical look at all that they’re doing and identify ways in which they can refine and improve their GTM playbook and their execution against plan. They’re playing a different game and should play to their strengths by leveraging every opportunity and occasion to appeal to consumers at the local level in order to compete more effectively.