Analysis: Impact of AT&T on US telcos and cable
November 20, 2025
Research analysts at BNP Paribas have looked at the news that AT&T had already enabled 23,000 of its cellular sites across the US to take advantage of its recent acquisition of EchoStar 30 MHz of 3.45 GHz terrestrial spectrum. The move will improve connectivity at 5,300 US cities and towns and AT&T says this will increase download speeds by 80 per cent for mobile users, and by 55 per cent for Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) customers. The bank’s report also compares and contrasts the differences for AT&T and its rivals.
BNP says: “While additional FWA capacity at AT&T is a headwind for all the cable operators, Cox stands out as the most exposed to the incremental pressure as AT&T will get the biggest boost to their 3.45GHz holdings in the Cox footprint (+84 per cent, vs 80 per cent nationwide), reinforcing our view that the Cox family is incentivized to close the Charter deal despite the nearly $5 billion drop in the value of the Charter stock they are getting as partial consideration. Given the Cox family’s long-term perspective (plus the $4 billion in cash and $6 billion of 6.875 per cent convertible preferred they get from the deal), we think they are potentially better positioned to reinvest to improve Charter/Cox’s competitive position and to try to shore up terminal value at the combined business. This feeds into the view we outlined last week, where we argued that Charter was constrained (by their balance sheet) in following Comcast’s lead, and why the Cox deal could be the catalyst for a bigger financial reset.”
The bank adds: “The average size of AT&T’s contiguous 3.45GHz-3.55GHz channel increases by +80 percent from lighting up the immediately-adjacent EchoStar spectrum (matching the 80 per cent the AT&T press release references), taking the average deployment in the band from 40MHz to about 70MHz. The largest increase in average 3.45GHz channel size occurs over the Cox footprint (+84 per cent), while the smallest is at legacy Optimum/CVC footprint (+64 percent) within Altice (which is +69 per cent on average when including Suddenlink). The trend across cable operators is the same if we narrow the analysis to the densest 50 per cent of national pops where it’s most likely AT&T has already deployed the spectrum at scale.
BNP says: “Including the 80MHz of contiguous C-Band (3.70GHz-3.98GHz) AT&T typically deploys alongside the 3.45GHz, AT&T’s average upper mid-band channel increases by +26 percent, from 120MHz to about 150MHz. Again, the largest increase is across Cox (+28 percent) while the smallest is at legacy CVC (+21 percent), and again the trend holds for the densest half of the country.
The report states: “While AT&T hasn’t articulated a subscriber ambition for its FWA product like its peers have, we would think of its overall capacity for FWA subs increasing by something closer to this +26 per cent than the +80 percent increase found when looking at the 3.45GHz channel on its own. For example, if AT&T was targeting 6MM FWA subs before, now it would be 7.5 million (+1.5 million); if the distribution of the incremental FWA headwind generally tracks the footprint size and market share of the operators, easily 100k of the +1.5 million FWA subs in this example could come from Cox (about 2 per cent of their subscribers).
BNP suggest that AT&T might restructure the entire 3GHz band in order to create larger contiguous blocks (which gained the support of the DoD) will gain traction at the FCC. “If this happened, we would expect the much-larger contiguous upper mid-band channel at AT&T to drive a notable further headwind in subscriber trends at the cable operators than whatever results from tacking on the 30MHz of EchoStar 3.45GHz spectrum,” says the bank,
“On its own, AT&T’s announcement today is not enough to move large holders to the sidelines. It is really just another slice in the ‘death by thousand paper cuts’ cable has experienced since the launch of upper mid-band FWA services by the big three MNOs, but which could begin to sting in the context of the fallout since 3Q/25 earnings,” concludes the BNP report.
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