Verizon's Proposed Purchase of Starry Expected to Face Few Regulatory Hurdles
In Verizon’s first big move under new CEO Dan Schulman, the carrier announced Wednesday that it plans to acquire Starry, a company that offers next-generation fixed-wireless broadband. Industry experts said regulators are unlikely to ask too many questions about the deal.
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Starry serves 100,000 multi-dwelling-unit (MDU) customers across its footprint. Verizon, which said it expects the deal to close in early 2026, reported in its last earnings call in July that it surpassed 5 million fixed-wireless access (FWA) subscribers in Q2.
Starry is no longer a public company, and the terms of the deal weren’t announced.
Joe Russo, Verizon's president of global networks and technology, said Starry "has demonstrated a unique and efficient approach to delivering high-speed internet in complex MDU environments.” By integrating its “technology and expertise, we will accelerate our fixed wireless access capabilities, giving millions of new customers a powerful and affordable broadband option.” Starry’s architecture is “less expensive to build, quicker to deploy, and uniquely addresses the complexities of urban settings where we can leverage our existing fiber and [millimeter-wave] assets,” Russo added.
Starry filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and completed its Chapter 11 restructuring process in August of that year (see 2308310051), after slashing staff and refocusing on dense urban markets with multi-tenant buildings (see 2301190047). The company has customers in five markets: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Washington, D.C.
The proposed transaction shouldn’t face regulatory headwinds, Recon Analytics’ Roger Entner told us. “This should be easy going,” since 100,000 customers “is a non-factor” in the broader wireless market. Entner said the deal is “largely a technology play.” A lawyer with wireless clients agreed that the issues raised are minor compared with other pending transactions.
Starry needed money to be deployed more broadly, Mobile Experts’ Joe Madden said in an email. “It’s difficult to compete nationwide as a small company, as deep pockets are required to build out a network” at scale. Starry “has a good architecture for high-capacity FWA in an urban environment, which is a good match for the Verizon FWA strategy,” Madden said. “Verizon has millimeter-wave spectrum that it can use in most American cities, but in others Verizon can use Starry’s 60 GHz FWA system to address MDUs and other urban residents. The 60 GHz band is unlicensed, so Verizon can use it anywhere.”
n a note to investors, MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett cited the financial issues Starry has faced. “We’ll be eager to hear more from Verizon about how the company will integrate their own licensed mid-band-fallow-capacity approach with Starry’s millimeter-wave-over-dedicated-facilities approach.”
Starry focuses on the MDU market “using a combination of licensed millimeter wave spectrum (24 GHz) with an unlicensed spectrum overlay,” Moffett noted. Unlike the FWA offerings of the “Big Three” carriers, “which rely on mid-band spectrum and a ‘fallow capacity’ model, Starry operates a hybrid model that uses dedicated radios, but -- unlike other millimeter wave solutions that had come before (and failed) -- Starry’s approach leverages existing macro-cell infrastructure.”
In Verizon’s Q2 earnings call, former CEO Hans Vestberg highlighted the importance of FWA. Combined with a fiber broadband strategy, it “continues to drive market share gains,” he said. Verizon had 278,000 FWA net adds in the quarter, “keeping us firmly on track to achieve our goal of 8 million to 9 million subscribers by 2028.”