Verizon touts mmWave 'breakthrough' as FWA growth slides to a record low

Verizon says it has a “technological breakthrough” that will bring 1-Gig home internet over millimeter wave spectrum to an incremental 10 million to 15 million US metro locations. CEO Dan Schulman made the claim on the company’s Monday, October 26 earnings call, the same call that showed its fixed wireless access (FWA) growth at a record low. ¹

The details are thin. Schulman did not say what the breakthrough actually is. He said Verizon would be in position to use it in the “medium term,” with first rollouts starting in the fourth quarter of 2026 and running into 2027. He said trials had produced some “operational success.” ¹

The numbers behind the pitch are weak. Verizon added 159,000 FWA subscribers in the third quarter, down 39.1% from 261,000 a year earlier and short of the 194,000 analysts expected. It ended the quarter with 6.36 million FWA subscribers. MoffettNathanson analysts called it the largest decline in net adds on record and the twelfth straight quarter of lower additions. ¹

Some of that is by design. Schulman said that if a customer needs a gig and Verizon can only offer 300 Mbps, “we shouldn’t sell the service.” He also said Verizon needs a much wider footprint where it can deliver 1 Gbps or more. LightShed Partners analysts offered another reason: home broadband customers sharing network capacity with mobile users is straining the network. ¹

CFO Anthony Skiadas supplied the one real clue, saying Verizon is scaling its multiple-dwelling unit (MDU) program to deliver “fiber-like speeds over an FWA connection.” Verizon began promoting an MDU-focused FWA product in January 2025. It later bought Starry, a startup with a 1-Gig-capable mmWave FWA platform for apartment buildings, coverage in parts of five markets and a batch of customers. ¹

Analysts connect the dots to Starry. New Street Research’s David Barden said Starry’s point-to-multipoint design propagates better than a traditional wireless network, and that most of what Schulman described appears to rely on Starry’s technology. He added that Verizon had struggled to copy Starry’s model without access to in-building wiring. LightShed’s Walter Piecyk and Joe Galone guessed the advance comes from a new vendor that can reliably deliver a gigabit to every unit in a building, which the previous vendor could not. All of this is analyst speculation, not Verizon confirmation. ¹

Apartment targets mean slow going. LightShed noted that MDU installs need landlord approval and detailed work, so they move slower than home installs, and that getting access will limit how fast new locations turn into revenue. ¹

Verizon does have a mmWave base to build on. Ookla’s RootMetrics testing in the second half of 2025 found mmWave in 2.2% of Verizon samples in urban and metro areas, versus 0.2% for AT&T and almost 0% for T-Mobile. Verizon’s mmWave showed up in 91 markets, up from 75 in the first half of 2024. Ookla named Denver, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Boston as its top mmWave cities, and Boston and Denver are former Starry markets. ¹

This story rests on a single outlet’s reporting, Light Reading, which in turn leans on the earnings call and analyst notes.

Our read: Verizon announced a promise, not a product. No city, price or plan has been named, and nobody can sign up for anything yet. Until Verizon says what the technology is and where it goes live, the Starry theory is educated guessing, and the record-low sign-ups are the only hard number on the table.

Footnotes

1. Light Reading, “Verizon’s mmWave ‘breakthrough’ fuels speculation amid FWA sub slump”. Retrieved October 29, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸