Verizon's Home Internet Business Continues to Be Bright Spot as Company Reports Earnings
Home internet remains a growth area for the carrier.
Verizon announced on Tuesday that it added 8,000 total postpaid wireless phone customers in the second quarter, alongside 384,000 wireless consumer home internet users, as the carrier looks to shake a streak of struggles.
Postpaid phone users, those who pay their phone bill at the end of the month, are a metric used by the wireless industry as an indicator of a carrier's success. In recent quarters Verizon has seen customers flee amid price hikes and increased competition.
Verizon's consumer division continued to struggle, losing 136,000 postpaid phone users, but those losses were offset by growth from the company's business unit, which added 144,000 postpaid phone users during the period. Also helping with the consumer division: a 3.5% year-over-year increase in consumer wireless service revenue and a higher average revenue per account.
All told, wireless service revenue at the carrier was $19.1 billion for the quarter, or what Verizon says marks a 3.8% increase compared to last year. It credits the increased revenues as being "driven primarily by pricing actions implemented in recent quarters, the larger allocation of administrative and telco recovery fees from other revenue into wireless service revenue, and a growing contribution from fixed wireless offerings."
Total revenues for Verizon in the period came in at $32.6 billion, ahead of the $29.88 billion that analysts polled by Yahoo Finance were expecting, but down by 3.5% compared to 2022. Verizon says that fewer phone upgrades were responsible for this drop.
On an adjusted basis, the company's earnings per share was $1.21, ahead of the $1.05 average that analysts expected.
As has been the case in recent quarters, home internet remains a growth area for Verizon, with wireless broadband seeing 251,000 consumer net additions and its wired Fios offering adding 51,000 users. The company's business unit added 133,000 wireless broadband users during the quarter.
Verizon says it now has "nearly" 2.3 million people using its wireless broadband service.
On Monday, the carrier confirmed that it planned to change up some of its home internet plans later this summer, including lowering the discount it gives those who subscribe to home internet and its traditional wireless phone service.