The largest U.S. cable operators, Comcast, Charter Communications and Altice USA, lost about 60,000 broadband subscribers in the second quarter of 2022, the first-ever quarterly loss in the category, according to Leichtman Research Group (LRG).

Broadband sub-losses for U.S. cable companies in the second quarter of 2022 increased from 840,000 a year earlier.

LRG found that the nation’s top telcos lost around 85,000 broadband subscribers in the second quarter of 2022, compared with a net gain of 50,000 a year earlier. These top telcos also gained 490,000 fiber customers while losing 575,000 non-fiber customers.

The clear winner this quarter was Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). T-Mobile and Verizon collectively added about 815,000 FWA subscribers in the second quarter of 2022, up from a net addition of 120,000 a year earlier.

“Over the past year, there were approximately 3,260,000 net broadband additions, with fixed wireless services accounting for 56%,” Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst at   LRG, said in a statement.

The overall picture for US broadband showed a marked slowdown this quarter. The top U.S. cable, telecom and FWA providers, which account for about 96% of the market, acquired 670,000 net broadband customers during the quarter, compared with an expected increase of about 1 million in the second quarter of 2021, LRG said. LRG said the second quarter of 2022 was a 67% increase over the second quarter of 2021.

The group had around 110 million users at the end of the quarter. Cable continued to lead the market with 75.6 million subscribers, followed by cable telcos (32.2 million) and FWA providers (2.2 million).

It’s not entirely clear how the U.S. cable industry will respond to the troublesome trend of broadband, a category of broadband service now seen as the core of the business.

Starry, a multi-dwelling unit-focused FWA provider that gained a record 9,703 customers in the second quarter, found that the general competitive response from cable was focused on product bundling and speed upgrades rather than lower prices.

Starry CEO Chet Kanojia said on the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call conference: “There’s a plan to fly towards more value than expensive bundled services and services that put the customer first rather than for granted. I think that as more fibre and fixed wireless competitors emerge, especially in suburban and rural areas, the share shift away from cable will continue.”

U.S. cable TV is expected to accelerate the pace of network enhancements, including upgrades to DOCSIS 4.0 in hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) plants, and hybrid fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks being built in greenfields, in some cases , existing brownfield areas.

In its latest Broadband Access Network forecast, the Dell’Oro Group expects wireline distributed access architecture (DAA) equipment revenue to grow to nearly $1.3 billion by 2026, up from about $1 billion in 2021.