(Bloomberg) — Verizon Communications Inc. has its first significant 5G revenue in sight: Wireless home broadband service looks to become a premium growth area at a time when traditional mobile-phone service is poised to slow down.
Using new C-band airwaves, Verizon plans to supercharge its so-called fixed wireless service by beaming high-speed connections into homes, competing with cable providers like Comcast Corp.
“It will give us another leg up in the fixed wireless marketplace,” Matt Ellis, Verizon’s chief financial officer, said in an interview Tuesday after the company reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results.
In a wireless market that’s grown so saturated carriers give away $1,000 phones just to sign on or keep a customer, the emergence of a new product couldn’t come at a better time. And while phone companies hope 5G service will eventually help power driverless cars and remote robotic laser surgery, wireless internet service for the home is a start.
Verizon is chasing T-Mobile US Inc. Verizon added 78,000 wireless home broadband customers in the fourth quarter, and had a total of 223,000 at the end of 2021. T-Mobile added 224,000 wireless home internet customers in the same quarter, bringing its total to 646,000. T-Mobile launched service in April.
Providing broadband without landlines isn’t exactly a new frontier. Phone companies have had varying degrees of success and failure with it over the past decades. The difference now, if you believe the conventional thought, is that new 5G midband airwaves can deliver massive amounts of data at blazing speeds without big limitations due to distance and weather.
Verizon posted fourth-quarter results that exceeded analysts’ estimates for subscriber growth and gave a full-year earnings forecast that also topped expectations. The absence of any downside surprise helped allay investor concerns about mounting 5G costs, and gives the company time to builds out its service.
“I think the launch of C-band is certainly a significant transition point for fixed wireless,” Ellis said.
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