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Dan Schulman was named CEO of Verizon on October 6, 2025. He is shown here giving a presentation at Mobile World Congress 2016.(Source: Jordi Boixareu)
Verizon revamped its fixed wireless access (FWA) offering with a 1Gbit/s service using millimeter wave spectrum to complement its fiber footprint in metropolitan areas and free up midband capacity for mobile services.
The carrier wants to increase the number of premises where it can provide 1-Gig speed broadband by an incremental 10 to 15 million using FWA in the medium term, according to Verizon CEO Dan Schulman, speaking during the company's third quarter earnings call today.
The high-speed FWA coverage will be in addition to the carrier's existing target to reach 40 to 50 million premises passed in the same timeframe. Verizon reiterated expectations that it will have more than 32 million fiber passings by the end of this year.
The service is rolling out this quarter and through 2027 and it marks "a more sophisticated, segmented approach to FWA," Schulman said.
"Using our millimeter wave spectrum, we have developed an innovative solution that will enable us to deliver a 1-Gig FWA product in metro areas across the country, complementing our fiber builds … This is a technological breakthrough for us with significant positive implications," he said.
The carrier has basically taken 1,700MHz of millimeter wave frequencies that were "largely underutilized" and turned it into "a competitive and differentiated advantage," said the CEO.
By using millimeter wave spectrum, Verizon said will have more capacity available in C-band spectrum.
"It makes our entire network more efficient. It offloads C band capacity, it gives our network more capacity and runway, and it significantly alters our spectrum positioning," Schulman added.
The carrier also said it is scaling its multi-dwelling unit program with the aim of delivering "fiber-like speeds" over FWA.
Q3 subscriber surge
Verizon added 314,000 broadband customers in Q3 across fiber and FWA. The mix has been steadily changing over the last year with fiber taking a bigger share of net broadband additions. In Q3, Verizon reported 155,000 fiber broadband connections, up 154% year-over-year but flat sequentially compared to Q2, and bringing the total to 11.07 million.
For comparison, AT&T added 442,000 fiber connections in the quarter (including adds from the acquired Lumen areas), for a total of 13.31 million.
Verizon FWA net additions were 159,000 in Q3, down 40% year-over-year, and have been in decline since Q4 last year.
Schulman said the change in broadband mix with more priority given to fiber has been a "deliberate choice." His comments, along with the revamped 1-Gig FWA service, suggested he was not happy with the speed or quality of the FWA service.
"I want to ensure we sell consumers the right service to meet their needs versus selling what we have available in our network. If a customer needs a gig of speed and we can only offer them 300 meg, we shouldn't sell the service. It's just going to be something that disappoints a customer," he said.
He added that Verizon will likely go well beyond its target of 8 to 9 million FWA customers by 2028 now that it has a high-speed offering.
In wireless, Verizon said it had the best Q3 in five years for net additions. The carrier added 406,000 retail postpaid phone connections in the third quarter, up 120% from 184,000 in Q2 and up 822% from 44,000 year-over-year. In prepaid, Verizon lost 52,000 retail core prepaid phone subscribers.
It added 137,000 net wireless postpaid accounts in Q3, said to be the best in over a decade, for a total of 34.5 million.
Overall postpaid phone churn improved by 4 percentage points year-over-year to 0.94%, while consumer churn also improved by the same amount to 0.87%.
Schulman's year of change
Schulman just completed one year as CEO of Verizon and the carrier is in a very different place, as he was keen to emphasize. On his first earnings call last year, he said the carrier needed a "full reboot." One of his first big moves was to cut more than 13,000 jobs.
With strong customer growth, the carrier again raised guidance for 2026. It now expects postpaid phone net additions to be in the range of 1.1 million to 1.2 million, up from previous guidance that was in the upper half of 750,000 to 1 million.
He stressed that this growth has been accompanied by cost discipline and "no free lines." The cost of promotions and acquisition was down by 41% and cost of retention dropped 30% compared to the same period last year.
Schulman can also point to how the carrier is lining up future, incremental revenue potential for fiber and edge services to meet demand for AI infrastructure. The carrier announced a $2 billion deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide dark fiber to its AI data centers. This follows a similar AI infrastructure deal with Google valued at $1 billion announced last quarter.
The carrier said it has a pipeline of other hyperscalers, neocloud providers and big enterprises it is in talks with for supply dark or lit fiber. Further, it claimed to have $4 billion worth of contracts signed for using its network sites for AI inference and edge computing.
The market, though, sees SpaceX with its mobile network plans as a cloud looming over Verizon as well as AT&T and T-Mobile.
Schulman said he has "eyes wide open" and that he operates under the assumption that SpaceX will do everything they say they will, "and that they will execute flawlessly." He also listed all the reasons why it will be difficult in terms of cost and time for the satellite operator to match Verizon's footprint and efficiency any time soon. "It's very hard to throw a punch against something that doesn't exist. But once they come into the market, we will be ferociously competitive," he said.
And he is still a hard no on an MVNO arrangement. "There are no back doors to any of our MVNO agreements, and I see absolutely no benefit whatsoever to extending an MVNO deal to any satellite provider," Schulman said.
About the Author
Senior Editor, Light Reading
Michelle Donegan covers all things 5G, 6G and mobile tech for Light Reading. She has been writing about the telecoms sector since the early 1990s.
Her first job was with Global Telephony magazine in Chicago, where she got an intro to publishing and tech reporting. After moving to the UK in 1999, she has covered telecoms tech, business and policy issues at publications including Communications Week International and Total Telecom. She was also part of Light Reading’s European editorial team from 2007 to 2013. Between stints at Light Reading, she was busy freelancing and was a regular contributor to Mobile Europe, Mobile World Live, TelcoTitans, TM Forum, and more.