Verizon has been slowly growing its 5G Home wireless internet userbase alongside its LTE and FIOS wired fiber internet, and it offered a discount when signing up for both internet and select mobile plans. Now it’s expanding that discount to anyone signed up for a monthly subscription mobile plan: $15 off each month’s bill when adding internet to mobile service, as well as an entertainment subscription plan perk.
With its most affordable home internet plan, mobile subscribers (excluding prepaid) can get internet for as little as $35.
The carrier relaunched its unlimited mobile plans into its myPlan offerings back in June 2023, and similarly rebranded its Home Internet offerings as myHome plans last June. Both plans allow you to pick extra perks, like digital subscriptions to Netflix and HBO, to add to your plan a la carte for $10 apiece, a saving of half their usual price or more.
Today’s announcement bridges these two offerings. The discount and extra perks bring on the next phase of the carrier’s plans to offer money-saving consolidation of services, said Frank Boulben, chief revenue officer for Verizon Consumer Group.
“You can describe it as convergence, the Verizon way. It’s simple and you get great value for the money that is unique,” Boulben said. He noted that the perks are based on exclusive partnerships with Verizon.
While the discount applies with any home internet offering, subscribers with a premium home internet plan get an extra perk credit on Verizon to choose, which is a $10 monthly savings. You can switch your choice of free perk every month. Mobile and home internet customers also get access to premium customer care, which expedites support responses.
Verizon, like other carriers, offers incentives like trade-in discounts for mobile plans to compete with its rivals. But this internet discount isn’t a similar effort to lure subscribers from the competition. Instead, it’s to grow the number of customers who have both its mobile and internet services, Boulben said. There’s crossover between mobile customers and, specifically, signups for Verizon’s 5G Home fixed wireless access internet.
“If I look at our fixed wireless access space, roughly speaking, 75 to 80% is to existing mobile subscribers. So it’s largely a cross-sell on the fixed wireless side,” Boulben said. “When we sell fixed wireless access on a standalone basis, a number of those customers take mobile afterwards.”
This is also part of Verizon’s efforts to get the word out about fixed wireless access, as awareness is lower than of traditional wired internet solutions, like Verizon’s FIOS fiber, which has been around for 20 years, Boulben said. It’s possible that customers might confuse fixed wireless access, which operates on the carrier’s 5G network, with mobile service to smartphones and handheld devices.
“5G Home [customers] maybe wrongly believe that it’s a kind of mobile hotspot, so I think we need to continue and communicate about the fact that it’s a complete replacement for your home internet connectivity,” Boulben said.
As of last October, Verizon had 4.6 million fixed wireless access internet subscribers out of a total 12.3 million connections when combined with wired fiber internet, according to the carrier’s fourth quarter 2024 earnings report. These are the company’s future, though growth is skewed toward wireless, which added 373,000 net customers in that quarter compared to fiber’s 51,000 additional net customers. Cable internet is the area that’s losing subscribers consistently over a number of quarters, Boulben noted.
Verizon’s fiber internet footprint covers 18 million households, mostly centered in the US Northeast. The carrier plans to expand its FIOS offerings to 650,000 additional households in 2025, and add a million more each year going forward. Its fixed wireless access availability is much broader, covering 60 million locations.
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