Verizon Beats With 55,000 Postpaid Phone Additions

WASHINGTON, April 27, 2026 – Verizon added fewer broadband subscribers than expected in the first quarter of 2026, but far surpassed expectations on postpaid phone additions.

The wireless carrier posted 214,000 new fixed wireless subscribers and 127,000 new fiber subscribers, including residential and business customers, missing Wall Street expectations.

But the company did much better on postpaid phone net additions, counting 55,000 new lines when analysts expected Verizon to lose 87,000. It’s the first time since 2013 that Verizon added rather than lost postpaid phone customers in the first quarter, CEO Dan Schulman said on the company’s earnings call.

“What’s new? Verizon adding positive subscribers in 1Q. That’s kind of the newest thing we’ve seen in a long time,” New Street Research analyst David Barden wrote in a Monday investor note. “But it came at a price as service revenue missed. FWA and fiber net adds missed suggesting the organization was oriented to achieve a singular goal.”

Still, Schulman said the company was eager to expand its fiber footprint in a bid to sell more bundled fixed and mobile broadband packages. He said the carrier has seen a 30 percent reduction in subscriber churn with those converged customers.

The acquisition of Frontier in January put Verizon at about 30 million fiber passings. The company is still aiming to hit 32 million by the end of the year, and is open to buying up additional assets to move the process along, Schulman said. Verizon’s medium-term fiber goals are 40 million to 50 million passings.

“We’re looking at more partnerships, potential acquisitions to speed the number of homes passed,” Schulman said.

The Frontier acquisition closed January 20, meaning subscribers Frontier added in 2026 before that date weren’t part of Verizon’s fiber net adds. The company now has a total of more than 10.7 million fiber subscribers and 6 million fixed wireless subscribers.

Schulman said 55 percent of those fixed broadband customers also took a mobile line. He said about 20 percent of the company’s mobile base also has broadband.

Mobile

After the better than expected postpaid results, Verizon said it now predicted its total net additions for the year would be in the top half of its previously guided range of 750,000 to 1 million. 

That should be doable, Barden wrote. 

“The strong postpaid phone net adds result shows that Dan Schulman is here to fight tooth and nail,” he wrote. “Anyone that doubted whether Verizon might achieve their guidance for the year should have no doubts after this quarter.”

He wrote the additions were more likely to have come from the churning cable subscribers than from fellow wireless carriers T-Mobile or AT&T, the latter of which reported 294,000 postpaid phone net adds in the first quarter.

MoffettNathanson founder Craig Moffett wrote it was odd that Verizon added mobile lines while losing 127,000 postpaid accounts over the quarter. He wrote that meant the company was likely “aggressively” adding lines to existing accounts.

“If so, it’s hard to imagine that that is entirely sustainable,” he wrote, “or particularly profitable.”

Despite this, Schulman went against analyst sentiment and argued competitive intensity in the mobile industry was lowering.

“We think that the competitive intensity in the industry is moderating, quite frankly,” Schulman said. “I think everybody’s thinking about ‘How do we look at retention in a much more segmented, and much more responsible, way than maybe we were several years ago?’”

He said he was eager to “microsegment” Verizon’s offers and ultimately make “ customized propositions for every individual customer.”

He said the company was in the “final stages of extensive market research” that will inform “a new generation of offers built around the principles of transparency, simplicity, and genuine value delivery.”

Schulman, already a Verizon board member, was brought in abruptly last year to stave off mobile subscriber losses. He’s also focused on making the company leaner, laying off 13,000 employees last year.

AI deals?

Schulman said Verizon was in talks to provide infrastructure to tech companies looking to connect data centers. He didn’t name which firms the carrier was nearing deals with.

“We are in quite deep discussions right now with hyperscalers, with alternative cloud providers, [and] large enterprises to integrate our fiber, both dark and lit, and our 5G assets to support their AI infrastructure efforts,” he said. “That has the potential for multibillions in revenue, quite frankly. We’ll have more specifics on that in the next two to three months.”

Schulman also said Verizon was part of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, a selection of companies the AI firm shared its new language model with. The idea was to beef up cybersecurity defenses as the model, called Mythos, is good at identifying weaknesses in code that had so far been missed by existing tools.