Verizon reports strong Q3, raises expectations, and announces 1-Gig FWA service

Verizon reported strong Q3 earnings today, but what new CEO Dan Schulman said during the conference call following the earnings release is more important. First of all, with Thanksgiving coming, let's talk turkey.

Verizon reports the best third quarter in five years

During Q3, the carrier had the best third quarter in five years for net additions. It added a net 406,000 retail postpaid phone connections from July through September. That is a 120% increase from the 184,000 added during Q2 and up 822% from the 44,000 increase in postpaid phone connections it reported for the same quarter last year.

Prepaid subscriber rolls are more volatile than postpaid with higher churn rates. That's why Verizon lost 52,000 retail core prepaid phone subscribers and basically shrugged it off.

The carrier added 137,000 in net wireless postpaid accounts, the best figure for the metric in over a decade, giving Verizon 34.5 million such subscribers. Overall postpaid phone churn shrank by four basis points to 0.94% and consumer churn declined by the same amount to 0.87%. This indicates a reduction in the percentage of subscribers that left the wireless provider during Q3.

Verizon increases its guidance for the remainder of the year

With the strong third quarter, Verizon felt compelled to increase its guidance for the entire year as it now expects 2026 postpaid phone net additions to be in the range of 1.1 million to 1.2 million. Before today's report, Verizon called for postpaid phone net additions to be in the upper half of a 750,000 to 1,000,000 range.

CEO Schulman said that these increases took place with cost discipline and, as he was happy to say, "no free lines." For the quarter, promotions and acquisition costs were down 41% year-over-year, while the cost to retain a customer dropped 30% on an annual basis.

This is good news for Verizon stockholders, but bad news for Verizon subscribers

Yeah, this is all great news if you're a Verizon stockholder, or if you're Dan Schulman. If you're a Verizon customer, this is actually crappy news because it means that you're not going to get any decent perks for doing business with the carrier.

Besides discussing its third-quarter earnings report, Verizon's CEO also took some time today to discuss a mmWave technological breakthrough for the carrier's FWA (fixed-wireless access). In metropolitan markets where people are densely packed together, Verizon will use blazing-fast mmWave spectrum to allow for the use of more mid-band spectrum for mobile.

As loyal PhoneArena readers know, mmWave spectrum delivers the fastest download data speeds, although these signals do not travel far and are easily blocked by trees and walls. This is why Verizon will stick to dense metro areas to use mmWave for FWA.

The carrier's FWA goals

The carrier plans to offer 1Gbit/s FWA service to an additional 10 million to 15 million people in the medium term. This is separate from the 40 million to 50 million premises target that Verizon has for its fiber-optic network expansion. By the end of the year, Verizon expects to have 32 million fiber passes.

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