Verizon's Fixed Wireless Plateau a 'Riddle': Analyst
The company said it's still on track to hit 8 million fixed wireless subscribers by 2028.
Jake Neenan

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24, 2025 – Verizon added another 373,000 fixed wireless broadband customers in the fourth quarter of 2024, for a total of nearly 4.6 million. It was slightly more than analysts had expected but similar to the same time one year ago.

“Verizon’s fourth quarter FWA results continue a trend of skewing more towards Business than Residential, where net additions continue to moderate,” MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett wrote in an investor note after the company’s earnings call Friday.
The company saw 216,000 residential additions and 157,000 business additions to the service, a similar breakdown to what it reported over the last year. Moffett called the flattening residential growth “a riddle,” since the company is still rolling out the C-band spectrum it bought in 2021 and, in doing so, expanding the areas in which it can offer fixed wireless.
“The deceleration marks the fifth straight quarter of [year-over-year] lower net additions,” he wrote. “That’s not what one would expect for a service offering that is still ostensibly in its early stages.”
Verizon’s also planning to launch a high-speed MDU product this year with its millimeter wave spectrum holdings, which Anthony Skiadas, the company’s CFO, said would be launching in “the next few months.”
Brightspeed tapped Verizon this week to offer fixed wireless service in its legacy copper footprint, which executive said should be a boon for the carrier’s service. ISPs have been looking to ditch their copper networks as consumer demand outpaces what it can offer.
Fiber
On the fiber front, Verizon added 51,000 consumer and business Fios customers, bringing the company’s total fiber connections to more than 7.5 million.
The company’s planning on expanding its fiber footprint to another 650,000 households in 2025 and upping the additions to 1 million in 2026, an effort to hit 30 million passings by 2028. That will partly be aided by Verizon’s $20 billion acquisition of Frontier, which executives said they expect to close early next year.
Jonathan Chaplin, analyst at New Street Research, thought the pace was too slow. The other two mobile giants are also scrambling to expand wireline footprints in an effort to offer “converged” fixed and mobile broadband, which makes customers stick around longer.
“Their current plans have them building at half the pace of T-Mobile and a quarter of the pace of AT&T,” Chaplin wrote in an investor note ahead of the call. “If convergence matters as much as the company says it does, they are moving too slow.”
He wrote the company might be holding back on builds to make cash available for stock buybacks in 2027.
Moffett noted that in practice, a convergence strategy is going to depend more on fixed wireless than fiber—the wireless carriers offer mobile service across most of the country but only have fiber laid in certain areas.
Verizon doesn’t report passings quarterly, but had roughly 18 million fiber passings as of October 2024 and is looking to hit 30 million by 2028. AT&T was planning to reach 30 million by this year and T-Mobile, which is in the process of taking over two regional fiber providers via joint ventures, plans to pass up to 15 million by 2030. Both companies are reporting earnings next week.
The mobile carriers weren’t expected to encounter much resistance from the Biden administration in their efforts to consolidate smaller fiber providers, and the Trump White House is expected to be even friendlier to mergers.
Chaplin wrote the most attractive target for Verizon would be Lumen’s consumer business, which Lumen is looking to offload. The company reported 4.1 million fiber passings in the third quarter of 2024.
Mobile
Also being talked about is the potential for a merger between Comcast and Charter. Those are two of the largest ISPs in the country, each counting more than 30 million fixed broadband subscribers, but they also both offer mobile service on Verizon’s network. (Analysts are also speculating about T-Mobile buying up Charter.)
Asked how a Comcast-Charter merger might change things for Verizon, particularly whether the combined entity might have more bargaining power when negotiating future deals, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said he wouldn’t comment on specifics.
“Our MVNO relationships are very important to us, they’re treated like large enterprises,” he said. “I think we both are very satisfied with the relationship we have and what we’ve built together.”
Executives downplayed the idea that a likely crackdown on immigration would stifle mobile subscriber growth, something analysts say they’re watching for.
Verizon ended 2024 with positive consumer phone adds despite hiking prices throughout the year, something New Street attributed to a promotional push in the fourth quarter.
“Verizon launched aggressive promotions towards the end of the year, which suggested that getting to the target of positive Consumer customer adds took some effort,” Chaplin wrote.