FCC’s Carr Concerned About Verizon-Contractor Commitments
Wireless Estimator reported some contractors said they weren’t seeing transparent pricing that the carrier agreed to.
WASHINGTON, April 16, 2026 – A longtime telecom journalist asked federal regulators Wednesday to look into whether Verizon was violating an agreement with contractors. On Thursday morning Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr suggested he was concerned.
“If Verizon is not living up to their commitments, then that would be a problem,” Carr posted on X in response to Wireless Estimator editor Craig Lekutis’s story.
In exchange for FCC approval of its $20 billion acquisition of Frontier, Verizon reached a deal with NATE, which represents telecom contractors, to institute a more transparent procurement process and account for inflation in its pricing, among other things.
Lekutis reported that in some markets Verizon was not doing that, citing contractors to whom he granted anonymity.
He described a monopsony, a reverse monopoly in which Verizon is the only or most significant buyer in some markets. That, he wrote, allowed the carrier to keep prices it paid for work flat amid inflation, or even push them lower in some cases, since contractors depended on Verizon’s business and were unable to replace them with other customers.
Lekutis wrote that the regional bidding processes at issue would likely be mostly complete before an FCC inquiry could even get off the ground. But he said the agency should still request documentation from the carrier since the company’s agreement with NATE was a condition for the agency's approval of the Frontier deal.
“Whether the FCC has the appetite for that confrontation is an open question, but we remain optimistic,” he wrote. “The authority exists, the predicate is established, and the framework agreement’s own language provides the evidentiary foundation.”
Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did NATE.
The FCC’s “enforcement of merger conditions is not exactly stellar,” Public Knowledge Vice President Harold Feld wrote on X. But Carr “has courted NATE as a major constituency in the ‘Build America’ agenda, so we’ll see what happens.”
Verizon CEO at Semafor conference
Meanwhile Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said Wednesday that he wanted the company to focus more on customer experience than network engineering. He spoke at the Samefor World Economy conference.
Schulman, former PayPal CEO and a longtime Verizon board member, came on as CEO abruptly last year in an attempt to get the company back on track and stymie losses of mobile subscribers to T-Mobile and AT&T. That involved a major round of 13,000 layoffs, which he told Semafor was part of a broader effort to reduce costs and free up money to “invest back in our customers.”
“The services that we offer are things that people need,” he said. “We need to do a fantastic job at providing those, and we need to think about: ‘How do we satisfy customer needs better than anybody else can, and establish a brand that stands for trust?’ That’s really the ultimate goal.”
Schulman said in January that Verizon was going to unveil a “new value proposition” in the first half of 2026. The company reports its second quarter results on April 27.
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