Verizon at TD Cowen Conference: Strategic Focus Amid Challenges

Published 28/05/2025, 18:02
Verizon at TD Cowen Conference: Strategic Focus Amid Challenges

On Wednesday, 28 May 2025, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) participated in TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The discussion, led by Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer of the Consumer Group, provided insights into Verizon’s strategic positioning amid competitive pressures and highlighted both achievements and challenges.

Key Takeaways

  • Verizon reported a 2.7% increase in wireless service revenue and a 4% rise in EBITDA for Q1.
  • The company is focused on network superiority, customer choice, and value through MyPlan.
  • Verizon plans to expand fiber and fixed wireless, expecting over one million fiber builds annually post-Frontier acquisition.
  • The acquisition of Frontier is expected to close by the end of Q1 next year, with significant revenue and cost synergies anticipated.
  • Verizon is leveraging its Tracfone acquisition to grow in the prepaid market.

Financial Results

Verizon reported robust financial performance in the first quarter of 2025, with wireless service revenue up 2.7% year-over-year and EBITDA increasing by 4%. Despite competitive pressures, the company remains confident in meeting its full-year EBITDA growth guidance of 2% to 3.5%. Price increases implemented in 2024 and January 2025 are projected to generate approximately $1.1 billion in revenue this year.

Operational Updates

Verizon introduced the "Best Value Guarantee," offering a three-year price lock and free phone upgrades, which contributed to a double-digit increase in gross additions in April and May. The company is also accelerating its fiber build-out, planning to add 650,000 fiber connections this year and over one million annually after acquiring Frontier. Over half of its fixed wireless customers are opting for premium plans, and Fios churn reached a record low of below 1% in Q1.

Future Outlook

Verizon anticipates a return to business-as-usual churn levels in the second half of the year, supported by its price lock and upgrade guarantees. The company expects to see higher year-on-year postpaid phone net additions and plans to continue expanding its fixed wireless services, particularly in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. In the prepaid segment, Verizon aims to leverage brands like Straight Talk and Visible for continued growth.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, Frank Bulbin addressed the competitive landscape, noting Verizon’s disciplined promotional strategy in response to extended holiday promotions by competitors. He also highlighted improvements in port ratios with cable companies and discussed the niche opportunity of satellite direct-to-device services, given Verizon’s extensive network coverage.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2025:

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: T. E. E.

Cowen. I’m joined, today by Frank Bulbin, the CRO of Consumer Group, Verizon. So, Frank, welcome and thank you for coming.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Thank you. Great to be here.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: So Frank, can you just provide an overview of your roles and responsibilities at Verizon and and what you’re currently focused on these days?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Sure. But before I do that, I need to refer to our safe harbor statement. Let you enough time to read it on the screen. So my role at Verizon, I’m the Chief Revenue Officer of the Consumer Group. So basically, I’m responsible with my team to design everything we sell to customers, so the value proposition, the pricing, the device component, the products, the content, and then how we go to market with it, so media, promotions, engagement with our channels and also base management or CRM, if you prefer.

But it’s a team sport. I’ve got my colleagues running the channels and customer service with whom I interact all the time.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Wanted to just talk about the consumer segment, particularly around the phone losses in the first quarter, a little bit bigger than us and what The Street were expecting, with churn a little bit higher. Can you sort of put a finer point on what happened during the quarter? We heard that it was the industry just had a rough January, all the big three for that matter. And should we think about this higher losses in churn as a result of the price hikes on the back book? And then you were sort of aggressive on the front book.

Maybe help us with what happened and what you’re seeing now in terms of So

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Greg, you and your peers are very much focused all the time on the postpaid phone net. But let me just take I’ll address your question, but let me take a step back first. We had a very strong Q1 in terms of financial. Wireless service revenue up 2.7%, EBITDA up 4%. And if you look at our phone nets in aggregate, consumer b to b postpaid and prepaid, we were up year on year by about 90 k.

And the reason why I’m talking in aggregate is, if you look at the quality of a prepaid phone net and the quality of a postpaid add a line phone net, it’s about the same.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Right. So the add online in the postpaid world could be the same CLV as a prepaid

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: company. Especially if you think of some of our competitors giving them for free. Yeah. Those have certainly lower CLV

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Yeah.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Than a prepaid.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Low calorie lines.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Low calorie lines. So overall, our phone nets in aggregate were better year on year. Now to address your question specifically on consumer postpaid phone nets. What happened in Q1? ’2 factors, one competitive and one intrinsic to Verizon.

Competitive factor is for the first time certainly since I’ve been with Verizon in the last eight years, we saw our competitors early January not dropping their holiday promotions.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Right.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So they stayed, that’s just lasted longer. Exactly. So when we dropped on January 8, we didn’t see our competitors following us. And the reason we dropped our promotions from the holiday period in January is that it’s a low demand period. Measures traffic in our stores is low, traffic to our digital properties is low, and and we have a disciplined approach

to No. True.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: From the marketing cost into the wind.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Exactly. So that was happening at the at the beginning of of January. And at the same time in January, we priced up our back book, as you mentioned. And that was a deliberate decision. We wanted to do it in January so that we would have almost a full year impact.

And our price ups, the ones we did in 2024 and those in January, will generate $1,100,000,000 of revenue roughly in 2025. So no second doubt about that decision. That was the right decision. But it obviously has an impact on churn that was a bit compounded by the competitive activity. In March, we saw the traffic picking up, so we invested more in acquisition, and we were high single digit in gross adds year on year in the month March, and that’s continuing in Q2.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: And so in 2Q, you’re saying that traffic is still picking up from the March cadence. So then so is that in the gross adds you’re seeing?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Yes. So what we did at the beginning of Q2, we introduced the Verizon best value guarantee, which has three components. One is we wanted to give peace of mind to our customers, so there is a three year price lock. Second, a free phone for new and existing customers, so our existing customers don’t need to hurry to upgrade their device. They have the peace of mind that when they decide to upgrade, there will be a free phone for them.

It’s tiered depending on which price plan you are on, but you have that peace of mind. And then we are doubling down on the savings we offer through our perks, so on streaming services, for instance. So we introduced best value guarantee on top of my plan and my home at the April, and we saw immediately an uptick in gross adds. So in April, our gross adds were in the up double digit, and that is continuing in May. So strong momentum on gross adds.

And we saw also an uptick on upgrades as we introduced the free phone guarantee.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: And then how about churn you’re seeing in the second quarter?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So all these actions we took to give peace of mind to our base, they will take time. So they will impact churn. We expect to be back to BAU levels in the second half of the year as the impact of the price lock and the upgrade guarantee play out. Right.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: And then in terms of the health of the consumer right now, we’ve got tariff and macro concerns. Are you seeing any changes in the behavior patterns with the customer? You mentioned that you’re offering a free phone for upgrades. This could be a good time to upgrade if we have these Apple tariffs. So curious to hear what you’re seeing in terms of the health of the consumer.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So in terms of the health of consumer, we have a premium customer base. And in our base, I’m not speaking for the industry, but in our base, we haven’t seen a change year on year. When I look at the key metrics for health of consumer base, for instance, the involuntary churn, no change year on year. And when I look at the quality of the new customers we are acquiring, whether it’s their credit score or the ARPA we are getting it, it’s better year on year. So we don’t see any sign of deterioration in the health of our customer base.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Got it. And I want to ask about the value proposition of Verizon. You mentioned you’re doing a three year price lock, free phones, you’re offering perks, but your rate card is a little higher. So one would just say, well, the things you mentioned would justify the higher rate card. So help us with the value proposition on what the brand stands for and how it is

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: value proposition, if I sum it up, is to offer the best value for money in the market. So what is the best value for money? First, it’s the best network. If you look at the latest route metrics, we have the most reliable five gs network. We cover 5,000,000 more square miles than T Mobile, as an example.

So continuing to invest in the network to offer the best network experience is paramount. Then now almost two years ago, we’ve changed the paradigm for pricing with the introduction of MyPlan, where we’ve separated connectivity from any other inclusion. So it’s offering customers control, transparency and choice. You choose your network experience, good, better, best. And then on top of that, you have perks, and all the perks give you a saving.

So for instance, if you buy the Disney bundle from Disney, it’s $20 You buy it from Verizon, it’s $10 And we have a number of third party perks like that. So what we’ve done is, by separating the connectivity from the perks, we, have customers paying only for what they want. They don’t pay for inclusions they didn’t want, And so that has also reduced our price premium with the competition, literally nonexistent with AT and T, and now around 10% with Tmall, ten percent, fifteen percent depending on I would say, 515%, that’s the range, and 10% on average. So we feel comfortable that our price premium is justified. Got it.

I want to talk about

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: the competition that’s not the other big two carriers. Cable, Comcast is now leaning into mobile even more. Even Boost had 150,000 ads, 50,000 of which were postpaid. So curious to hear your thoughts on this competition. You obviously had the wholesale agreement with cable, so you get some money on the back end of it.

But any color here on playing some defense against Some

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: money, I just want to rebound on that first. It’s accretive for us. When we lose a retail customer to the cable companies, we lose the spread between retail and wholesale. But when the cable companies acquire a customer from somebody else in the market, we get the wholesale revenue. So if you add up the spread we lose and the wholesale we gain, it’s accretive for us, and the MSOs are taking from us less than our fair share of the market.

So that’s a good financial relationship for us. If I look at it with my retail hat, year on year, we see our port ratio with the cable companies improving. So I think they’ve peaked, and now they are probably, even if they don’t disclose it, starting to incur some churn. That’s how we can explain that the port ratio are starting to improve. Got it.

I want to

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: talk about margins. Do you have concerns around maintaining margins in this sort of high volume environment, right? You priced up your back book. Everyone’s aggressive on the front book. So there’s a musical chairs going on.

And obviously, that’s not good for margins. I mean, the price hikes help in terms of financial but just curious to hear your thoughts on the margin cadence given this high volume activity. So

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: first, coming back to Q1, we grew our EBITDA 4% year on year in Q1. We’ve guided for the year between 23.5% for EBITDA growth, and we are confident we’ll achieve that guidance. And when it comes to promotion, we have a disciplined approach to promotion. I mentioned earlier the timing of our promotion, so we are more aggressive when we see more demand in the market. We also, most of the time, we tier our promotions, so we give you more value if you are on a premium plan versus some of our competitors who are any plan.

And we also have most of our promotions with trade in, and we have a great monetization machine to extract value from the devices that are traded in. And if you look at those very aggressive promotions that were introduced in Q1, in particular, the buyout promotions, We don’t market any buyout promotion. We see that AT and T has indicated that they will stop by the end of this month. So it leaves only T Mobile out there with a very aggressive buyout promotion.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Right. And help us with the 2025 trends then as we think out the year. You said that churn will reach BAU levels in the second half. When you put it all together, does do you still see 2025 consumer phone adds higher than 24 consumer

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: phone We are confident that our phone net postpaid phone nets will be up year on year, by the way, on the prepaid side. We have a number of levers to address the churn. So the Verizon base value guarantee, I just mentioned, with the price lock and the upgrades. We have a personalized treatment of our base.

We are also continuing to deploy our C band network, our five g network. And what we see is customers who are experiencing the five gs C band network with a capable smartphone churn less than those who don’t. And the last and critical lever is we have more and more customers that have mobile and broadband with us. And those customers have a much lower churn. Roughly speaking, right now, 16 to 17% of our mobile customers have got broadband with us, whether it’s fiber or FWA, and those have a significantly lower churn.

So those levers will continue and play out during the year.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Definitely want to talk about convergence of fiber, but last question on wireless before we do it, just on the upgrade cycle. As we talked about, you’re offering a free line or free phone rather out there on device promos With trade With the trade in, right? And we’re seeing possible tariffs. How do you so we saw some slight uptick in first quarter upgrades. How do you see the second quarter shaking out to date?

And do you see this impacting the upgrade rates with the tariffs these Actually,

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: first quarter, are slightly down year on year.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Are slightly down.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: But we’ve guided for the year that we’ll be mid single digit up year on year for upgrades. In Q2, obviously, as we introduced the new promise with a free phone with trade in for new and existing customer, we saw an uptick. With respect to the tariffs, it’s difficult to say. It’s a bit of seesaw. So we saw at the April, there was probably some pull forward.

Customers worried about increase in device prices, then it calmed down. Now with the new announcement of 25% tariff, maybe it’s going to come back. In any case, the decision to pass on the tariffs to customers is a decision for the OEMs, for the smartphones manufacturer. We have no intent to increase proportionally our promotions.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Okay. So the burden will be on the customer with the tariffs they And the OEMs. And the OEMs. Got it. Did want to talk about fiber and more specifically Frontier.

Just walk us through what we can expect on day one of the Frontier integration, like what would that look like? What are your near term initiatives with the integration, first few months out of the gate? And what do you see in terms of shaking out one year after the close?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So first, we are very excited with that acquisition. The Frontier management team has done a great job with respect to their fiber buildout, improving their customer metrics, their financial metrics. So we are acquiring a very healthy asset that has got momentum. We expect the acquisition to close no later than the end of Q1 of next year, so it’s coming quickly, and we want to hit the ground running. What does that mean?

We want to be able, day one, to cross sell frontier fiber to our mobile customers in the frontier footprint and vice versa to cross sell mobile to the frontier customer base. So those revenue synergies or customer synergies will be the priority. And then we will implement all the operational changes, so rebranding, bringing our tech stack to Frontier, the network synergies, etcetera. We’ve communicated that by year two, we expect $500,000,000 of OpEx synergy run rate.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Right. Would that include copper decommissioning, which is happening right now or potentially happening soon? Is there upside to that since there’s been a lot more development with the FCC?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: I’ll pass on that one. I don’t know the details for Frontier.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Well, talking about the build out in general, can you help us with the maximum fiber builds you could do per year with Frontier? Frontier was at like a 1,300,000 cadence or something like that and you guys are at around 500,000.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Yes. So this year, we are doing 650,000 in the Fios footprint. So we’ve accelerated from last year. We did four and fifty thousand last year. We’ve guided that post closing, we will do 1,000,000 plus for the combined footprint of Frontier and Fios with an emphasis on the plus.

So you can expect us as we get closer to the integration of Frontier that we’ll communicate an updated number. And when when you go to market with the converged strategy, what is Verizon’s fiber and bundling marketing strategy? What’s your

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: messaging in the marketplace? You know, help us figure out how it resonates with customers.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Yes. So first, it’s demand led. And look, I’ve had the experience of converged markets in Canada and in Europe, and there are good and bad ways to address convergence. If you do it in the supply led manner, which happened largely in Europe, with basically a price war cross selling the other product at a steep discount or even offering it for free, the the entire industry went down. Mhmm.

That’s not, our approach. Our approach is a demand led approach. So for those customers that want the one stop shopping experience, having one store to go to, one customer service number to call, and having a cohesive package, we have a value proposition. So what we’ve done is we’ve introduced MyPlan, I was referring earlier, and we’ve got MyHome as well on the broadband side. Same logic, you choose your speed, good, better, best, and then you add the perks on top and linear TV if you want.

If you are a customer who wants mobile and home from us, it’s very straightforward. You have a $15 discount on the broadband side, and if you are a premium customer, you get a perk on us. So it’s a value proposition we’ve introduced now a couple of months ago, and it’s less aggressive than the discount we had last year, Yeah. And it’s resonating very well with customers. But but one important caveat, when you think about convergence, it works only if both products have got a strong NPS.

Sure. If you have a product with a bad NPS and one with a strong NPS, you put them together, you’re gonna deteriorate the product with a good NPS.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Yeah. That makes sense.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: If both have a strong NPS, then you improve the churn on both products.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Yeah. If you’re a customer and you had problems with, say, your wireline, you don’t want to bundle more stuff on Exactly. The company that you’re having problems with. That makes sense. But you mentioned the discount is $15, but I guess the math or the logic works that you discount the bundle, but then churn is that much lower, extends out the tenure of the and hikes up the CLV.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Yes, absolutely. The economics work very well, especially on fiber. The mobile churn can be reduced by as much as 50%.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Yeah. I mean, that sounds like a really high number, like the 50% churn reduction. It’s one, it’s higher than we’ve seen in whether it’s our survey work the rest of the industry.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Yep.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: I’m curious, what are you doing differently to see such churn benefits in the wireless side?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So it comes also from the fact that our Fios product is extremely strong. In q one, our Fios churn on the fiber front was below 1%, which is a record low. I haven’t seen that in any other geography. So when you combine that fiber product that customers are extremely satisfied with, our best five g experience and our My Planned Value Probe, you get to that 50% reduction.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Got it. I want to switch gears to fixed wireless, continues to be an area of strength for Verizon. What are your thoughts on the fixed wireless runway? Is there life beyond the 8,000,000 to 9,000,000 subscriber goal? And what subscriber level would you need to hit before you think about augmenting capacity, whether it’s cell splitting or other ways to get fixed wireless to the home?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Let’s take a step back. A couple of years ago, I was asked the same question. Is there life after your four, five million Right. Target?

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: So we are eight to nine.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: We we achieved the four, five million ahead of time. That’s what we want to do with the $89,000,000 target, achieve it ahead of time. As a reminder, we are selling fixed wireless access only where we have excess capacity in the mobile network. So in finance in financial term, we have no dedicated CapEx for FWA. Right.

So it’s an ancillary benefit of deploying our mobile network, and that’s our approach to get to the $89,000,000. And to your question, there is a runway to get there. We have not completed the deployment of the C band network. By the end of this year, we’ll be at 90% of our macro sites upgraded with C band. We are also introducing a solution for MDU for fixed wireless access.

So we’ll continue and have a runway on the fixed wireless access side. What’s also interesting is more than half of the customers on fixed wireless access side take the premium plan and not the entry plan. So they get speeds up to 300 megabit per second, and NPS of those customers is very high.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Mhmm. And I presume if, you know, the administration is looking for 600 megahertz of spectrum, if that came to market, I mean, that could be the gift that keeps on giving in terms of upping your

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So look, I I like that saying wireless. I’ve been in wireless for a long time. I’ve never met the megahertz, I didn’t lie.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Right. Sure thing. Who are your typical fixed wireless customers these days, whether it’s age, income, rural versus suburban? Is it shifting more towards rural as you deploy the c band out to those areas?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Correct. At the beginning, where we were focused on Tier one cities with millimeter wave and C band, customers were skewed to those high density areas as we’ve continued and deployed C band. Now I would say it’s following the population distribution. And the majority of our customers are coming from cable.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Got it. And that’s a good segue into sort of talk about the competition. During the first quarter, traditional cable broadband operators did multiple things to stop the bleeding, if you will, from fixed wireless threats, particularly price lock guarantees, increasing visibility into their pricing and packaging, increased investment to customer care, creating value oriented packages for price sensitive customers like hunting downstream if you will. In the second quarter to date, it seem like these initiatives from cable are impacting fixed wireless net adds in your business?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: I don’t see any change in the low NPS or negative NPS scores of cable companies. So we continue and see the same momentum on FWA. I think some some of the practices that customers hate, they are still doing them, like promotional roll off

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Yeah. Sticker shock.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Is the number one pain point. We stopped doing that on Fios, almost five years

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Right.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So and we didn’t take a hit when we did it. Customers do like the transparency. They hate the fact that you have a price year one. And then at the end of the first year, there is a price hike of 40%.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Right, right. A quite large hike. Is it safe to say through the balance of this year, next year, there will be a bigger push towards rural customers with fixed wireless because you’re going to be rolling out that C band PC category through the end of the year and then finish it out completely in 2020?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Yes, yes. Mechanically, the mix is going to change, less Tier one and more Tier two and Tier three.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: And where does fixed wireless fit in the overall strategy? Is it that you eventually get these subs to a fiber solution at some point in time?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: That’s there is no plan to do that. There might be one exception in the frontier footprint over time. We don’t sell fixed wireless access where we have fiber in the Fios footprint. So if your address qualifies for fiber, we will present you only fiber product. But as we integrate Frontier, we will have customers that are on FWA that could be served with fiber.

So over time, we will offer them an upgrade path if they want to.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Wanted to shift gears and just talk about prepaid because you mentioned it a couple times now, you know, thinking about prepaid and postpaid almost as similar CLVs at least the postpaid free lines etcetera. And it’s been resilient for Verizon recently. Just help us with the growth opportunities in prepaid and lower income and on postpaid. At what point would you consider creating value packages to target lower end customers and talk about prepaid as a source of growth?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So as a reminder, four or five years ago, we we were not a big player in prepaid. We had only Verizon prepaid. And end of twenty twenty one, we acquired Tracfone, and Tracfone was an MVNO. And because they were an MVNO, they were not competitive at the high end of prepaid where you have unlimited plans. And so what we’ve done since the acquisition is we’ve repositioned all of the brands in the TracFone portfolio so that they are now competitive at the high end of prepaid.

So we’ve done that with Straight Talk, which is exclusive to Walmart. We’ve done that with Total Wireless, and there, we are building a network of branded stores with agents. At the end of twenty twenty four, we had 1,200 stores. At the end of this year, we’ll have 2,000 stores. So total wireless is growing very fast.

And then we have Visible, our digital only brand. So those three brands are generating the growth of our prepaid business, and they are all at the high end of prepaid. So that’s where we are taking share. Got it. So even if the prepaid market was flattish in in q one, we took share from our competitors.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Got it. And with the minute we have left, I just wanted to switch topics yet again to the satellite direct device opportunity. What are your ambitions with this product? How will it fit in your strategy? It seems like carriers like T Mobile, they’ll give it away on premium plans.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: Is this

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: going to be the offer construct for satellite D2D in the future?

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So they’ll give it away. They also said they will charge $15

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: So subscribers, they will jump on.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So we’ll see. Look, I think we’re in a different situation. As I said earlier, we cover half a million square miles more than t mobile. Mhmm. So we have very few gaps.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: Right.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: We we cover more than 99% of where people live, work, and and play.

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: I see.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: So we we need satellite for niche usage. I don’t know if you are a tracker and Right. You you get in the Appalachian or or you drive through a desert or you go to a national park, that’s when you might want and use your satellite connection for safety or to communicate back home. And so we we will have a solution for that, but I think $15 seems a bit rich to me. I don’t think customers will be ready to pay for Especially

T. E. E., Analyst, Cowen: as you’re painting the map red, so robust. With that, we’re just about out of time. Thank you.

Frank Bulbin, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon: You’re welcome.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

Latest comments

Risk Disclosure: Trading in financial instruments and/or cryptocurrencies involves high risks including the risk of losing some, or all, of your investment amount, and may not be suitable for all investors. Prices of cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile and may be affected by external factors such as financial, regulatory or political events. Trading on margin increases the financial risks.
Before deciding to trade in financial instrument or cryptocurrencies you should be fully informed of the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, carefully consider your investment objectives, level of experience, and risk appetite, and seek professional advice where needed.
Fusion Media would like to remind you that the data contained in this website is not necessarily real-time nor accurate. The data and prices on the website are not necessarily provided by any market or exchange, but may be provided by market makers, and so prices may not be accurate and may differ from the actual price at any given market, meaning prices are indicative and not appropriate for trading purposes. Fusion Media and any provider of the data contained in this website will not accept liability for any loss or damage as a result of your trading, or your reliance on the information contained within this website.
It is prohibited to use, store, reproduce, display, modify, transmit or distribute the data contained in this website without the explicit prior written permission of Fusion Media and/or the data provider. All intellectual property rights are reserved by the providers and/or the exchange providing the data contained in this website.
Fusion Media may be compensated by the advertisers that appear on the website, based on your interaction with the advertisements or advertisers
© 2007-2025 - Fusion Media Limited. All Rights Reserved.