Verizon Closes Starry Acquisition
New Street foresees a deceleration in fixed wireless growth.
WASHINGTON, March 10, 2026 – Verizon recently closed its acquisition of fixed wireless provider Starry, Verizon CFO Paul Skiadas said Tuesday.
“We’re entering 2026 with more capacity on fixed wireless access than we entered 2025,” he said. “We just completed our acquisition of Starry, and that’ll help us expand our product in the MDU space and give us more open-for-sale on fixed wireless access.”
Skiadas spoke at the Deutsche Bank 34th Annual Media, Internet & Telecom Conference in Palm Beach, Florida.
Verizon purchased Starry for a still-undisclosed sum in large part for its proprietary technology for serving apartment buildings and other multi-dwelling units (MDUs) with fixed wireless. Verizon had an existing MDU fixed wireless service it had tested in several markets before reaching a deal to acquire Starry in October, but the company evidently wanted a boost.
Starry’s “architecture is less expensive to build, quicker to deploy, and uniquely addresses the complexities of urban settings where we can leverage our existing fiber and [millimeter wave spectrum] assets,” Joe Russo, Verizon’s EVP of global networks and technology said when the deal was announced.
Skiadas said Verizon had finished building out its C-band spectrum macro sites and was now focused on densifying with small cells, a process the company is aiming to finish this year.
On the residential front, Verizon’s fixed wireless additions have been slowing down, decreasing year-over-year for nine straight quarters despite a sequential improvement in the fourth quarter of 2025.
“FWA net additions have been heavily skewed towards business lines, but, again, less so this quarter,” MoffettNathanson founder Craig Moffett wrote in an investor note on those results. “The deceleration in residential continues, but the deceleration was more modest than has been the recent trend.”
Verizon announced a network slice for business fixed wireless customers in December, which it said would offer more consistent performance that wouldn’t be affected by congestion on its 5G mobile network.
AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said at the same conference Monday that he also foresaw growth in the carrier’s fixed wireless service, especially among business customers. The carrier only reports residential fixed wireless customers in its quarterly earnings reports.
“We’ve seen really good success with fixed wireless on the small business side,” he said. “That’s where I would expect most of the growth to come from.”
Desroches predicted AT&T would “basically be at nationwide coverage for fixed wireless” in 2027.
New Street foresees “plateau”
Verizon counts more than 5.7 million fixed wireless subscribers and AT&T has nearly 1.5 million, compared to T-Mobile’s more than 8.4 million.
The carriers collectively added about 806,000 residential fixed wireless subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, which New Street Research noted in a recent report was up from the same time the year prior.
But the firm also noted gross additions – total new subscribers before subtracting disconnects – did not grow as much year-over-year as the previous quarter. Disconnects also didn’t grow by as much as they have been, but New Street thinks they’re destined to climb as the customer base expands.
“As gross adds plateau, net adds will fall as disconnects will continue to grow with the base,” analysts David Barden and Vikash Harlalka wrote.
That would be good news for cable companies. They’ve been shedding subscribers as fixed wireless and fiber continue to take share
Cable’s share of gross adds (SOGA) was 41 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, which the analysts said was the lowest since they started tracking the data. That’s compared to fixed wireless’s 32 percent.
“The decline in Cable SOGA from pre-pandemic levels has coincided most closely with the rise in FWA SOGA,” they wrote.
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