We asked you what it would take for Verizon to bring you back and the answer was no surprise

Joe Russo, Verizon's outgoing EVP and President of Network and Technology, is stepping down after just over 30 years, believing the best network is the one you never notice, whether you're running a Galaxy S26 Ultra or an iPhone 17 Pro Max on it. We asked ex-subscribers what would bring them back, and price beat network complaints by a mile.

The idea Russo built his career on

Russo's read on network engineering is simple: if people notice it, something's wrong. He told Fierce Network as much:



That mindset traces back to a summer internship at Bell Atlantic in the 1990s, and it carried him through the shift from copper to fiber, then 4G, 5G, and now early 6G planning. Russo hands the role to former Deutsche Telekom executive Abdu Mudesir in early 2027 before retiring for good.

So we turned his philosophy into a question for you. 52.79% of voters said cheaper plans would get them to come back to Verizon. Only 15.79% wanted a better or faster network, and 11.48% wanted improved coverage, while 19.94% said nothing would bring them back at all.

Reliability isn't what's keeping people away

That's a strange kind of win for Russo. If the goal really was a network nobody thinks about, this poll suggests he mostly pulled it off. Only about 27% of respondents cited the network or coverage as a reason to return, and that number looks smaller once you remember plenty of longtime subscribers walked away over price hikes earlier this year, not because their bars dropped.

That is important for T-Mobile and AT&T too. If ex-Verizon customers aren't shopping for a stronger signal, network bragging rights carry less weight than the monthly bill. MVNOs like Visible and Mint Mobile, which lean almost entirely on price, are probably better positioned to win this group back than any new 5G milestone.

What the 19.94% tells us

If you're one of the 19.94% who said nothing would bring you back, that's worth sitting with. Almost a fifth of respondents aren't shopping on price or performance anymore, they're just done.

For everyone else, the takeaway is simpler. Verizon's reliability doesn't appear to be in question anymore, at least according to you. What's still in question is whether the carrier is willing to compete on price the way its own MVNOs already do.

Where Verizon's pitch still falls short

Russo isn't wrong that reliability builds trust. But trust alone doesn't win back a subscriber who already left, and this poll makes it pretty clear that price decides it for most people.

Verizon has leaned on network quality as its calling card for years, and based on what you told us, that part of the pitch isn't what's broken. The pricing pitch is. If Dan Schulman's promised customer-first era is going to move the needle with ex-subscribers, it likely runs through cheaper plans long before it runs through faster speeds.

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