Verizon Network Surviving L.A. Wildfires as Carrier Goes Big on AI
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg told investors Friday that the carrier’s network is holding up reasonably well in the Los Angeles area as wildfires sweep through the region. Meanwhile, Verizon announced it added more than a billion postpaid mobile and broadband subscribers in Q4, its best numbers in more than a decade, though the carrier's move to AI dominated its investor presentation. There was little discussion on the call about Verizon's huge investment in 5G.
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“Our teams are working hard to protect and restore service to affected areas, support first responders and help neighbors safeguard themselves,” Vestberg said at the start of his remarks.
The network is “holding up strong, maintaining critical connectivity for the community, businesses and first responders,” Vestberg said: Verizon engineers have worked "around the clock, restoring nearly all of the macro cellsites that were impacted, and we will continue to be here for employees, customers and communities in L.A.”
Verizon is holding its own against AT&T and T-Mobile in the fight for customers, executives said. It was the first of the big three carriers to report.
Among the numbers, Verizon reported 568,000 postpaid phone net adds in Q4, up from 449,000 in the year-earlier quarter. Total fixed wireless access net adds came in at 373,000 for the quarter, growing the base to nearly 4.6 million. Verizon “is well-positioned to achieve the next milestone of 8 to 9 million fixed wireless access subscribers by 2028,” it said.
Fios Internet net adds were 51,000, compared with 55,000 in Q4 2023. Excluding its SafeLink Lifeline product, Verizon added a net 65,000 wireless prepaid customers, after net losses of 263,000 a year ago. Total operating revenue was $35.7 billion in the quarter, up 1.6% over the previous year. Net income was $5.1 billion, compared with a net loss of $2.6 billion in Q4 2023.
Officials also said Verizon’s $20 billion buy of Frontier, announced in September (see 2409050010), appears on track to be completed by early 2026.
AI Future
Much of the discussion on the call was about Verizon AI Connect, which, executives said, will be important to the company’s growth as it offers solutions and products for other businesses that want to take advantage of the rapidly growing technology.
“To meet current and future demand from hyperscalers, cloud providers and global enterprises, Verizon is building on its strategy to power the AI ecosystem with reimagined existing assets integrated in Verizon’s intelligent and programmable network,” said a news release. Verizon noted it’s working with other companies, including Nvidia, Vultr, Google Cloud and Meta on its AI offerings.
Vestberg told analysts, “We have worked with AI for many, many years, and we already today have several generative AI products at scale in our company.” Verizon is using AI to personalize service for customers and “intelligently pair customers with the best available care representative” in its call centers.
Verizon also sees a growing market providing services to other companies, Vestberg said. “We are now looking into how we can use our assets and our capability to serve this market when it comes to the next step of generative AI.”
During the call, Kyle Malady, CEO of the Verizon Business Group, presented the new AI offering. “As we take stock of our existing assets, Verizon's ability to be a foundational player in the AI ecosystem is clear,” he said. “This is not a theoretical discussion -- we are seeing increasing demand for our AI Connect offerings."
Malady said that whether AI workloads “are across a multi-cloud environment deployed on our customers' premise or at the edge of the networks, we have a suite of offerings that businesses can utilize to fully leverage AI capabilities.” Verizon has “unmatched fiber assets,” he added. “We have edge-to-cloud connectivity and expertise, and we are ahead of the curve in this area.”
Verizon’s network is “intelligent and programmable,” and customers want to be able to control “where and when AI workloads are running,” Malady said. The carrier is also focused on computing at the edge of the network, he said: “As AI shifts from training to deep deployment, the need for distributed computing will become increasingly important for real-time decisions and predictions.”
MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett told investors that a major question is whether Verizon subscriber growth can be maintained. The Donald Trump administration’s “border crackdowns will pressure subscriber growth for the whole industry,” Moffett said: “Given Verizon’s outsized exposure to the prepaid market via Tracfone, Verizon will face a particularly steep uphill climb.” Moffett said most of Verizon's numbers were as expected. “We’re struggling to find anything here that suggests anything at all that will surprise anyone ... in 2025."