A strong Q4 2025 from Verizon’s mobile unit bested AT&T in postpaid and postpaid phone net adds for the first time in a year.
Impact: Verizon’s consumer postpaid phone net adds came in at a better-than-expected 551,000, up 50% year-over-year and beating AT&T’s 421,000 net adds in the category. The Q4 gains helped Verizon offset three consecutive quarters of losses in the category and delivered 137,000 consumer postpaid net adds for the full year, boosting the company’s consumer postpaid phone base to nearly 75 million. Verizon wants to maintain that postpaid momentum and build on it in 2026; the company aims to achieve between 750,000 and 1 million postpaid phone net adds for the year while wrapping up its C-band spectrum deployments. CEO Dan Schulman said the deployments currently sit at around 90% complete and cover 300 million people. Verizon officials also said efforts around advanced 5G standalone service nationwide are nearly done. AT&T, meanwhile, ended 2025 with 421,000 postpaid phone net adds in Q4 and more than 1.5 million for the full year, which increased its consumer postpaid phone base to 90.8 million. Q4 consumer postpaid phone net adds increased 4% sequentially but fell 12.7% YOY. Full-year net adds declined 6.2% from 2024. Though bested by Verizon in the category even though AT&T had its best quarter of 2025 in Q4, it’s a good bet AT&T officials remain satisfied with the company’s postpaid performance, likely preferring the steady growth of their company’s consumer postpaid phone net adds rather than the feast or famine cycle Verizon has faced for the past few years. As for spectrum, AT&T already got its hands on 3.45 GHz spectrum it’s in the process of buying from EchoStar and plans to have those licenses fully deployed sometime in the early part of this year.
As has been mentioned since Verizon closed its Frontier acquisition on January 20, Schulman and company see a lot of potential for wireless growth in the acquired Frontier footprint, which they believe will help boost convergence opportunities in areas viewed as “underpenetrated.” Schulman outlined four reasons why customers leave Verizon: price increases without corresponding value, which irritate customers; issues with the customer experience, whether that be in onboarding, billing, or calling customer service; price perception in which consumers believe Verizon has more expensive pricing than its rivals; and competitive intensity related to rival carriers’ offers and positioning. AT&T remains high on convergence; CEO John Stankey said AT&T’s share of the postpaid phone market comes in 10% higher in areas where it also offers fiber. AT&T also views convergence as a means to stem rising churn rates, but a research note from MoffettNathanson called the company’s rising churn “cause for concern” because the number of customers leaving AT&T increased. Rising churn appears to be an industry-wide issue right now, however, so it’s not simply an AT&T or Verizon problem. Verizon blamed its increased churn on previous price hikes and competition in the market but noted that its new customer focus as well as convergence should help tamp down churn rates.
Both AT&T and Verizon also reported decent growth in fixed wireless, with Verizon adding 209,000 FWA consumer subscribers in the quarter to boost its total consumer base to 3.4 million. Though Verizon’s net adds demonstrated a 72% sequential improvement from the 121,000 consumer FWA net adds reported in Q3, the net adds declined 3.2% YOY. AT&T Internet Air adds did the opposite and fell 18.1% sequentially while increasing 24.9% YOY. For the full year, Verizon added 693,000 consumer FWA subscribers compared to 846,000 in 2024, which works out to an 18.1% decline. But even with fewer FWA net adds, Verizon still boosted its consumer FWA base to more than 3.4 million.
AT&T, which entered the FWA fray later than its rivals and has been playing catch up, added nearly 875,000 Internet Air customers for the full year, up 61.7% from a year ago. That increased its consumer Internet Air base to 1.5 million, more than double the 634,000 subscribers it counted as of year-end 2024. Neither CEO delved too deep into fixed wireless on their Q4 earnings calls though Verizon CFO Tony Skiadas called out strong demand for the product in Q4, particularly on the consumer side, and Schulman highlighted the company’s increased network capacity to support FWA. Stankey blamed Q4 seasonality for the sequential Internet Air decline and emphasized AT&T’s fiber-first approach but said that ongoing network modernization efforts and the additional spectrum it has acquired have helped extend Internet Air to more customers, particularly in areas without fiber access. AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches also hinted that Internet Air has helped boost the company’s convergence numbers. However, there’s a good chance T-Mobile will top both rivals in postpaid phone and FWA net adds based on recent history and its lead in 5G.
