Verizon

Verizon sells almost exclusively to U.S. customers — the company has no meaningful international revenue. The consumer segment targets households with wireless and broadband bundles; the business segment serves a broad range of enterprises, federal government agencies, and public safety networks. U.S. wireless is a mature, effectively three-player market (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile), with competition centered on network quality, pricing, and increasingly on convergence bundles. Postpaid wireless customers exhibit very low voluntary churn, making the subscriber base highly predictable. Revenue is overwhelmingly recurring — roughly 83% from services, the rest from handset sales.

• Postpaid phone net adds: the primary subscriber health indicator; Q2 2026 came in at 184,000, the best quarterly result in five years
• Broadband net adds: 348,000 in Q2 2026, covering both FWA and fiber; management targets 8–9 million FWA subscribers by 2028
• Total fiber premises passed: over 30 million post-Frontier, with a medium-term target of 40–50 million
• ARPU (average revenue per account): the key pricing-power signal in wireless, watched closely for evidence that unlimited-tier upgrades are holding
• Postpaid phone churn: low single digits; converged fiber+wireless customers churn materially less than wireless-only

Verizon's durability rests on infrastructure that cannot be quickly replicated — decades of spectrum licenses, towers, and now a coast-to-coast fiber network acquired through the Frontier deal. Spectrum holdings, especially C-Band mid-band licenses purchased for roughly $45 billion, create a high barrier to quality competition. Network reliability is the primary brand equity in wireless; enterprise and government customers in particular exhibit very high switching costs given the integration depth of private 5G and managed services contracts. The dividend history — uninterrupted and growing for 20+ years — reinforces the defensive cash flow profile, though the debt load limits financial flexibility.