I recently co-presented at the Texas Telephone Association’s Summer Conference with Joy Milkowski, CEO of Access Marketing Company. Our session was called They’re Coming for Your Subs, and I opened with a question I’ve been asking operators in private conversations for months.
“Do you think your competition is acting irrationally?”
A lot of heads nodded. Some nodded enthusiastically. I hear versions of the same concern all the time:
- “They don’t understand what it costs to serve these areas.”
- “These markets can’t support that much competition.”
- “This is a market failure. They’ll figure it out and leave.”
It’s a comforting story. It’s also the wrong one.
Every competitor entering your market is acting rationally. The problem isn’t their logic. It’s that you’re evaluating their decisions using your scorecard instead of theirs. Once you understand the game they’re actually playing, their moves stop looking irrational, and the gaps in their strategy become much easier to spot.
Four Rural Broadband Competitors. Four Rational Strategies. Four Different Weaknesses.
1. Private Equity-Backed Overbuilders
PE-backed overbuilders aren’t building to operate. They’re building to sell. Fiber transaction multiples climbed to nearly 20x EBITDA during the easy-money years, with most private equity firms buying in around 15-18x. Today, multiples have compressed back to roughly that same range, leaving many funds facing a difficult math problem.
Their solution is simple: grow subscribers as quickly as possible. Build fast, focus sales and marketing efforts within a concentrated geography, then move on to the next market. What looks reckless when viewed over a 20-year operating horizon makes perfect sense on a three-to-five-year exit timeline. And while some firms are beginning to extend that horizon, the underlying challenges haven’t gone away.
The Competitive Advantage for Rural Broadband Providers
They’re building to win subscribers, not necessarily to sustain long-term operations.
Construction schedules are aggressive, which often means torn-up streets, missed commitments, and crews that disappear once the build is complete. They would argue that customer service remains a priority, but anyone who has compared a local rural provider with a larger organization knows the experience is rarely the same. Large companies simply have more complexity to manage.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth they would rather not discuss: many of these companies aren’t planning to own these networks for decades. Someone will eventually buy the assets, but your company will still be serving the community year after year. Your customers don’t automatically know that. You have to make that case consistently, clearly, and repeatedly.
For rural broadband providers, this creates an opportunity to differentiate through long-term community commitment, local service, and trusted customer relationships, advantages that investment-driven competitors often struggle to replicate.
2. Fixed Wireless Access (FWA)
5G fixed wireless is the competitor that fools people the most. The pricing looks predatory until you understand the economics behind it.
Wireless carriers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into 5G, yet the returns haven’t come close to matching the 4G era. Revenue has remained relatively flat, while capital intensity continues to stay high.
In many rural markets, however, carriers are sitting on underutilized spectrum with very little mobile traffic competing for it. The marginal cost of adding another Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) subscriber is almost zero. There’s no truck roll, no installation appointment, and no technician visit. They simply ship the equipment and the customer plugs it in.
This isn’t primarily a broadband strategy. It’s a spectrum utilization strategy. Once you see it that way, $50 per month FWA pricing isn’t charity. It’s incremental revenue from an underused asset.
The Competitive Advantage for Rural Broadband Providers
Their coverage map isn’t your coverage map.
Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) performance depends heavily on cell density, and rural America has the lowest cell density in the country. Because wireless capacity is shared, speeds can slow during peak usage periods. Unlike fiber, you can’t simply light another strand to add capacity.
When service problems occur, customers often find themselves calling a national support center where no one knows their town, let alone how to dispatch a technician there. That’s a real vulnerability, but only if you’re helping customers understand it before they experience it themselves.
For rural broadband providers, educating customers about the real-world performance differences between fiber and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) can be a powerful competitive advantage before they make a purchasing decision.
3. Cable operators
Cable companies are playing defense and offense at the same time, and they’re beginning to show signs of turning things around.
They’ve been losing broadband subscribers to both fiber and FWA in their core markets while simultaneously expanding into adjacent territories to recover lost growth. Mobile bundling has become one of the key pieces of that strategy.
They’re not entering rural markets because they suddenly became passionate about rural broadband. They’re there because they need subscriber growth somewhere.
The Competitive Advantage for Rural Broadband Providers
Cable has a structural trust problem.
Customers have seen promotional pricing double after twelve months. They’ve watched unexpected fees appear on the second bill. They’ve struggled to understand contracts that seem intentionally complicated.
One of my favorite examples lately is the wave of “price lock” guarantees we’re seeing.
Think about what that really means. If someone is willing to lock today’s broadband price for years for the exact same product and speed, there’s a good chance they expect pricing pressure to push rates down, not up.
I’ve tracked broadband pricing by speed tier for several years, and the long-term trend is clear: prices are generally falling, not rising. You might occasionally see isolated increases, but overall, broadband pricing continues to move downward.
If you’ve ever had a subscriber return after a cable promotion expired, frustrated by the experience, you already know this opportunity exists. The question is whether you’re systematically taking advantage of those moments or simply enjoying the schadenfreude.
For rural broadband providers, cable’s pricing complexity and trust challenges create an opportunity to win customers with transparent pricing, local support, and a simpler customer experience.
4. Starlink and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Providers
Starlink and other LEO providers are the competitors that many operators still want to dismiss. That’s a mistake.
Following its IPO, SpaceX was valued at approximately $1.75 trillion. One particularly interesting detail from its S-1 filing is that Starlink generated 109% of the company’s profitability. In other words, Starlink has become the cash cow funding the broader business.
Subscriber growth has been extraordinary, increasing from roughly 2.3 million users to more than 10 million in about two years. At the same time, ARPU has declined from $99 to approximately $66, while the company has invested roughly $21 billion in capital expenditures.
When you’re pursuing subscriber growth at that scale, especially across international markets, pricing inevitably comes under pressure.
Translation: they need more subscribers, and they need to slow the decline in ARPU. Your rural fiber customers paying $70 to $80 per month are exactly the type of subscribers who help solve both challenges.
The Competitive Advantage for Rural Broadband Providers
First, acknowledge reality: Starlink works remarkably well. The biggest weakness appears when something goes wrong. There’s often no one to call. No local phone number. No technician. No one who has ever heard of your town. Their promotional pricing, sometimes as low as $39 per month with discounted hardware, means plenty of customers will try the service. Some will love it. Others won’t.
When those customers decide to come back, make that process effortless. A win-back opportunity is a gift. Don’t waste it with a three-day installation window. For rural broadband providers, competing with Starlink isn’t about denying its strengths. It’s about highlighting the value of local support, fast service restoration, and real customer relationships when subscribers need help most.
What Should Rural Operators Do?
Understanding why your competitors make the decisions they do is the first step. But that knowledge only matters if it changes how you compete.
This was probably the most important point from our session. Nearly every operator in the room, and probably every operator reading this, would tell you they have great people, excellent customer service, and deep local roots. Those are valuable qualities. They’re also exactly what everyone says. It’s what your competitors’ marketing agencies are writing for them right now.
The operators that continue to win aren’t saying the same things everyone else says. They’re saying things their competitors simply can’t say, and they’re backing those claims with proof. One attendee shared a story that I haven’t stopped thinking about: “We are so local that our sales rep was hit by a horse and buggy.”
Try putting that in a Verizon press release. That story works because it’s specific. It’s authentic. And it instantly communicates how deeply embedded that company is within its community. No national carrier can manufacture that. No PE-backed overbuilder operating on a 36-month investment timeline is going to stumble into that kind of story either.
Most operators already have stories like this.
- The technician who drove through an ice storm.
- The crew that restored service on Christmas morning.
- The customer service representative who recognized a customer’s voice before they even introduced themselves.
The challenge isn’t finding these stories. It’s building the discipline to collect them, document them, and use them consistently in your marketing. “We have great service” is a slogan. A real story, featuring a real employee and a real customer, is proof. There’s a big difference.
The most successful rural broadband providers turn these authentic customer stories into a competitive advantage. Instead of relying on generic marketing messages, they demonstrate, with real examples, why their local expertise, customer service, and community relationships are difficult for national competitors to match.
The Bottom Line
Competition in rural broadband isn’t irrational. It’s predictable. Every competitor has a financial logic behind its decisions, and that logic creates weaknesses you can exploit if you’re willing to stop admiring the problem and start understanding how to respond to it.
Many overbuilders won’t own these networks for the long haul. FWA has real spectrum and capacity limitations. Cable’s trust issues are deeply embedded in its business model. LEO providers generally don’t have a human being showing up at your customer’s front door.
You can compete. But not by pretending the competition will go away, not by running the same “we’re local” play your neighbors are running, and not by assuming your customers already know what makes you different.
You absolutely can compete. But not by assuming the competition will go away, not by running the same “we’re local” play your neighbors are running, and not by assuming your customers already know what makes you different.
Be specific. Be provable. Be the clearest choice. And if your sales rep gets hit by a horse and buggy, for the love of God, put it on your website.
What’s the most specific, uncopyable proof point your company has? Drop it in the comments. I’d genuinely love to hear your own “horse and buggy” story.
For rural broadband providers, long-term success depends on understanding the strategy behind every competitor, not just reacting to pricing or promotions. The operators that consistently win are the ones that communicate a clear, provable value proposition that national providers can’t easily replicate.