The only convergence lever that works is the one you buried

Marketing has been calling it convergence for twenty years. Every carrier's annual investor day has featured a bundle slide. Most of them have been wrong about what they were selling. Real convergence, as a seamless, better-together service, is still years away. What we have settled on calling convergence is selling wireless and home Internet to the same customer. What we have is one company owning both the fiber running under the street and the wireless network running over it, allowing that company's market share to compound. Everything else is packaging. This is a different reading of the consumer data than the industry narrative assumes. It's also the reading that the numbers support. Across 691,743 mobile survey responses and 688,282 home broadband responses collected between April 2023 and March 2026, the cleanest predictor of a carrier's wireless market share in any given area is not brand, not network quality, not price, and not the sophistication of the bundle offer. It's whether that carrier owns the fiber in the ground. Everything that a marketing organization can do to sell convergence matters less than the one decision made five to ten years earlier about where to pull fiber.

[Roger Entner, in addition to leading Recon Analytics, advises telecom, media, and technology companies on strategic and tactical business issues.]