AT&T and Verizon Q4’25 earnings reveal a striking divergence in their Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) performance that deserves closer examination.
Verizon reported 319,000 FWA net adds – up both sequentially and year-over-year. AT&T, meanwhile, added 221,000 FWA subscribers, down from 270,000 in Q3’25.
AT&T CEO John Stankey had flagged the seasonal softness investors should expect during a Q4’25 investor conference, but the Street clearly missed it (a point management didn’t hesitate to mention on last week’s earnings call!).
But peeling back the onion a bit more, it begs a larger question. Throughout 2025, AT&T was active in consolidating spectrum assets – especially honed in on enhancing its 3.45GHz holdings. The company also secured a lease agreement for Echostar’s 3.45GHz spectrum (which AT&T will eventually own outright) that was able to be deployed immediately with just a software upgrade.
Verizon, by contrast, has made few spectrum purchases since it spent $45+ billion (before clearing costs) in the 2021 C-Band auction (FCC Auction 107). Verizon leaned in very hard in that auction, buying as much as 200MHz of C-Band spectrum in some markets. While paying such a high price was a controversial move at the, it allowed Verizon to build a wider midband spectrum highway. This highway is on which its growing FWA base drives on today.
Interestingly, despite limited recent spectrum acquisitions, Verizon projects significant runway for FWA growth ahead. CEO Dan Schulman stated on the Q4’24 call: “We did 1.2 million fixed wireless net adds last year. And we enter 2026 with more capacity in our network to do fixed wireless access than we did when we started 2025.”
According to the Wireless Infrastructure Association (WIA), the average smartphone user consumed ~ 28GB of data per month. This compares to the typical FWA user who uses 300GB month. Importantly, this study was done in 2023 – and my guess is usage has meaningfully grown in the last three years.
If we assume the FWA user used 10x times that of typical wireless handset users, Verizon’s “enter 2026 with more capacity” claim is remarkable – particularly for a company who is very much a ‘show me’ story in Wall Street land today.
While Verizon faced heavy criticism in 2021 for overpaying for C-Band spectrum, this FWA performance may be the metric which drives overdue vindication. Today, Verizon serves 2.8x more fixed wireless customers than AT&T.
By leaning aggressively into fixed wireless, Verizon has positioned itself as a broadband provider extending well beyond its (recently expanded) wireline footprint. It offers a broadband solution – with or without wires.
Brand repair has become paramount for CEO Schulman and his team. On its recent Q4’25 earning call he did not mince words:
“One of the reasons why we have been losing share over the last several years is because we kept raising our pricing without corresponding value. And that is the primary reason why our customers churn. And the number one rule of getting out of a hole is stop digging. And we’re just not going to do that again.”
Under Shulman’s guidance – the digging has stopped and the shovels have been put down. The building Verizon has already did is working. FWA performance – and the capacity to sustain it – could be the critical tenant of this turnaround.
Time may show that Verizon’s BIG spectrum bill five years ago was not a miscalculation at all.
Their multi-lane highway is built, while others are still in construction mode.