Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our event today. We're happy to host you, everybody in the room, and also those on the webcast. We've got a great agenda for you today. We've got myself, I'm Brady Connor, Head of Investor Relations. I'm joined today by Hans Vestberg, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and the Verizon Executive Leadership Team. We've got a great agenda. We said on the fourth quarter earnings call, this is gonna be more of a operational update. Today, you're gonna hear some opening remarks from Hans, then we're gonna get straight to the consumer group from Sampath, the business group from Kyle, and the network operations from Joe. Then we're gonna end with a Q&A session open for the analysts in the room and all the VLC in attendance.
Before we get going, I need—I do need to cover the safe harbor statement. We're gonna make forward-looking statements today that contain risks and uncertainties. Those are covered on our website, as well as we may make statements around non-financial GAAP measures. Those measurements, the corresponding GAAP measures for those are included on our website. I knew I was gonna fumble that, and so with that, Hans, I'm gonna turn it over to you. Clicker or no clicker?
No, I have no slides.
Okay, great.
I don't need to click. Hello, and good afternoon, everyone. Great to be here, and for everyone on the webcast, thanks for joining. We call this an analyst meeting. As Brady said, I think it's important. We just wanted to do as we did last year. Many of you were here in this room, get the chance to meet our team. So that's the main thing, because we have a lot of new faces in our leadership team, but also, have a chance to listen to our operational unit heads, Joe, Sampath, and Kyle, talking about their operation, because I think you're tired about listening on me and Tony, because we just finished our fourth quarter, went over the financial guidance and that. So we wanted them to talk a little bit what they're doing this year and the priorities they have.
Then, of course, we want to open up at the end here for any type of questions you might have for us. So that's sort of the idea with this analyst meeting. So it's a little bit as we did in May, I think it was May last year when we gathered in this room, and just a continuation on that. Let me start with the team, and I just want to go over a little bit. My team members are here, and for the ones on the webcast, you might not see them, but you will know who they are. The guys that will speak here, of course, Sampath, Joe, and Kyle. Sampath running Consumer, Kyle running Business Group, and Joe is the President of Network.
They all start their jobs in April 2023, so they're less than one year in job. That doesn't mean you're nice to them. You can ask any questions because they are deep into the operations. On that side, in the room, to my right, we have, of course, Tony that succeeded Matt somewhere also in the timeframe of April, so a lot of changes in less than a year, one year. Vanda is our Chief Legal Officer. She started at the end of 2022 into 2023, running everything that we do in that area. Sam, Head of HR, she's probably one of the longest running seniors in my team on same position, been within the leadership position for the last three years almost.
Craig, to the right, I jumped one there. We'll come back to that. Craig is running Verizon Global Services, the platform where we do the back office, see that we're both helping with revenue for the units, but also being more efficient. Been in operation for one year, appointed a little bit more, been running that. In between the two, we have Leslie. Leslie, you can go easy on. She has only been here for three weeks. Leslie is the new Chief Marketing Officer, coming from previous work at Twitter, or now called X, and Peloton, but also other experiences, so we're really happy to have her. At the same time, we also have announced some changes that we're gonna do soon. Jimmy Gerace is in the room somewhere, and Jimmy is over there. He has worked for Verizon 37 years.
He's about to leave, and we actually have announced his successor, which is Stacy Sharpe, that is coming from Allstate, and she will join the first of March. Looking at my Head of HR, so I keep all the data. I have two other announcement that we've done very recently as well. Rima Qureshi has been heading up M&A, Strategy, and Partnership. She is also leaving us, and Chris Bartlett, way back there, will take over that job. Chris has been the CFO of Verizon Business Group. Then you also ask, who's gonna take over after Chris? Scott Krohn is in the room as well. He's our Treasurer, and he will be the new CFO of Verizon Business Group.
So couple of changes, all of them are here in the room, so you can ask questions, whatever. So we're excited of having them here. I've got to say a couple of words in the beginning here. You've heard so much from me, but if I think about the last couple of years, we have done quite a lot of structural changes in the company, and not mentioning all of them, but we start, of course, changing our go-to-market, and fundamentally, we start working with the Verizon Intelligent Edge Network. If you don't remember that, that is sort of the fundamental, fundamental how we build the network.
Joe will talk about that, because that's still so important for us, so we can transport all the data in efficient, cost-efficient way, but to also see that we can deliver to our customers what they're expecting for us. That work has been ongoing five years, and sort of we still have some work, but the big bulk has been done, and we work much more with the access right now, and Joe will talk about that. So that's important. We also, during this time, remember, with the very small watch where we actually added C-Band, which was enormously important for us. We'll talk a little bit about the success we have seen when we deploy C-Band. I want to talk a little bit more about it today.
We also added millimeter wave, which I think is one of the key differentiator with the Verizon Intelligence network, very important additions. We continued also to divest some of our businesses, as you might remember, Verizon Media Group, adding also TracFone. All that brought us into 2022. I would say 2022, we had, I said it public many times, we didn't perform well in the first half of 2022, and we started to refocus with those assets because we had everything we wanted. And as you've seen since then, our focus will be very clear of sequential improvements, very much financial discipline, very much segmentation, seeing that we have the right offerings for our customers for the customer at the right moment. That whole thing has been, of course, ongoing now.
And if you look at 2023, we just closed our books for 2023. We reported that ending a year where we had a growth of service revenue of 3.2%. But not only that, we saw almost $48 billion in EBITDA and a cash flow of $18.7 billion. And we saw through the year sequential improvement, and that's how we look at our business right now. We have all the right assets in the portfolio. We have a great strategy. We have a team that really knows what they're doing and very focused on operational execution, and we're executing on that. And that's what you saw when we reported the fourth quarter.
Of course, the fourth quarter volumes were good, both on broadband, and on wireless, both in the business side and on the consumer side, and the guys will talk about that. For us, it's a continuation on that, and I would say our assets right now and our strategy, I really like it, and the team will have in order to execute on that. I will come back after the guys has been going over what they're doing with the priorities for 2024 and onwards, but with this, I will hand it over to Sampath.
Hey, good afternoon. 2023 was about operational excellence and large-scale transformation. You should expect more of that in 2024 as we go along. Let me start covering some of the big moving parts of 2023. The first was myPlan, an incredibly strong plan, and internally, I keep saying myPlan is on plan. The biggest piece it took was it took care of our price perception. We had a price premium in the market that was slightly unsustainable. This brought it back. We have 15% price premium with the market, which gives us a lot of comfort and a lot of momentum in the place. We have 13 million customer lines already on it. That's going to more than double in the coming year, so good, strong momentum based on the back. And it's a unique proposition. You know, it stands on its own.
Its unique value, differentiated proposition, and really well-received by our channel. The second thing is created a regional structure. This is in the operations and the guts of the business, but we had a national organization, national sales, national marketing. We broke the country down into six markets, and then each market, we further broke it down between six and ten different territories. So every territory has a, a boss who's in charge of the territory to do sales, do service, to ensure what insight comes from the market. We are able to make decisions really quickly. A lot has to do with, look, it's not a national business. There are some markets where we have really strong share position, emphasis is on churn there. Some markets where we have a lower share position, we want to go aggressively on acquisition.
So we're able to tailor offers locally, make decisions at the local level, which is really yielding a lot of benefits for us, and we know how to do this. We've kind of done this most of our lives here at Verizon. The third is local marketing. You know, we had large national campaigns, you know, large campaigns, both on digital as well as on, you know, on TV and print and other places, and we've shifted a fair amount of that money to local. And what it does is it goes back into the communities we serve. Look, Verizon is a local brand that's aggregated at a national level, so that has helped a lot. You know, events that we didn't sponsor at a local level, local connections back to the community, and that's also giving...
It's aligned with the structure we have on our sales side, so you're seeing a lot of connection there that's working very well. The fourth is new sales compensation plan. You know, as COVID worked in, we had moved into more group-based compensation for large portions of our team, a lot of our sales teams. Starting in October, we moved back to individual sales compensation plans. You know, October, November, were a little bit of... We had some training wheels for them. December, we took off the training wheels, so our sales teams, both our indirect, our agents, our management teams, all are on individual sales compensation now. And you can see the benefit. Look, our overall volumes grew 17% on the phone side in fourth quarter, but our corporate stores, where we have bulk of our volumes, grew 23%.
A lot of that can be attributed to some of the work we did on sales compensation. All of these large-scale transformations are fundamentals, and I think we've gotten maybe one or two quarters of benefits from a lot of them this year, given when we started. 2024, we're gonna continue that, keep pulling the execution lever on that to get to a better place in 2024. But at the end of the day, I want to talk about our approach to how we take care of our customers. Look, I think the market's gonna probably add 7 million-odd phone consumer connections in this year. And it starts for us, it starts with the network, and for us, it means the C-Band. And one of the most interesting things for us is, in C-Band markets, we see 3 very interesting things.
The first one is better premium mix, up to 10 points, 10 percentage points better premium mix in C-Band markets, which is really accretive from our pool perspective. Then we see 8 points of better gross add growth in the C-Band markets than the non-C-Band markets. And then lastly is churn. 4 basis points of phone churn improvement better in the C-Band markets than without the C-Band. So as the C-Band markets grow, as we get the second tranche, and as Joe builds out the next part of the network, you're going to see that benefit of those gross add, premium mix, and churn flow itself out to some of the other markets and a larger portion of our base. But the foundation is a better network. We strongly believe in that.
We've built our network to very high, exacting standard, whether it's C-Band or millimeter wave, but we have existence proof that a better network works for us. The second piece is this exclusive value prop that we have. You know, we saw that in the fourth quarter. We had the Netflix Max offer for $10. We keep adding new things in the market. We had the, you know, Sunday Ticket earlier in the fall there. New value prop on the back of our perks, but more importantly, value that customers cannot get elsewhere. You know, you can get five of the best streaming services for $20. And what we've seen is, because of this value prop, our ARPA has grown 5% in 2023.
Just think about it, on a base this big, a 5% growth on ARPA, average revenue per user, has been really good. And with our myPlan construct, our incoming ARPA is significantly higher this year in 2023 than it was in 2022, because we're able to bring in customers on a network, higher premium, add perks. And perks has been interesting. Our attach rate on perks from when we started to where we are right now has almost doubled, because our sales teams have gotten more comfortable selling it, customers understand the value, and some of the marketing work we've done about it. So that's our value prop, but then we move to Mobile Plus Home.... And here, look, think about it, we have 17.5 million OFS on fiber. You know, we are celebrating our 20th year of Fios, right?
So we are literally the OG player in fiber when it comes to it. So 17.5 million homes of that, and another 50 million homes have access to FWA coverage. So we have one of the largest broadband footprints there, and now it's the work of bringing our mobility and our fixed and our broadband base together. We see double-digit improvement in churn when we do that continuously. And look, we keep adding more Fios, and of course, we keep adding more FWA. So it's a really nice, self-fulfilling wheel that works itself. The last is personalization. You know, in the second quarter of last year, one of the first things we did is we pulled back on broad, really large reach-deep promotions. We started targeting them really aggressively.
We have a lot of data about customers, so go back to the Segment One. You know, almost a vast majority of our customers use our app, so I want that to be the place where they get personalized offer that targets them. You may want an upgrade today. Someone may not want an upgrade, they're quite comfortable with the phone, and that's one of the reasons why we have a slightly softer upgrade environment that's coming in. But personalization is the key. We've put in foundational elements. For every customer, we track 1,500 data points, and we're able to make 133 odd predictions about them. Put that into a personalization model. When they get the upgrade, what's the next best action?
More importantly, we're able to roll it out into the field, whether it's with sales, whether it's with service, whether it's a different indirect channel. That same personalization engine is accessible to all as we do that. So that's our model. Look, at the end of the day, it comes down to being very financially disciplined. Our value is the same. Look, we start with service revenue, rolls down to EBITDA and free cash flow, but this is the wheel that makes it all happen. This is our approach to customer management that makes all of that happen. Let me just jump to 2024 to give you a sense for where we are. First is mobility. Look, most importantly, we want to get back to phone positive net add growth in 2024. We said that in as part of our guidance, earlier this year.
It's very important to us to do that. Now, look, Q1 is a seasonally soft quarter for us, and we've just gone through a pretty large price increase. 32 million lines have been priced up as part of this price increase, so you do expect some churn to come off that. But overall, for the year, we are gonna be a phone net add positive as we come. But the balance of P&Q is very important to us. I know I have said this ad nauseam many times, getting the right balance. Look, our value prop is good right now, and on the Q side, it's all the transformation we've done in sales and marketing. That gives you balance on Q.
We've seen some churn advantages from it, and we're gonna continue putting on price, because at the end of the day, the product we are putting out, customers like the product we are putting out, and that gives us confidence about the price increase we just did. Customers value the network, they value the premiumness of the plan, and as a result, we tend to see ARPU accretion based on that. The second is home broadband. We're gonna continue the rate we had. You know, it's a combination of really strong Fios as well as FWA, continue the rate. And at FWA, what we are doing is spending time on ARPU. You know, if you look at it, we did a price up in the third quarter of last year, and then we are seeing significantly better premium mix even on that.
So we're getting a double advantage from that, a price up, plus a better premium mix on our FWA piece. So now work is on, and it's typical of any large plan. First, you get in, you want to take initial market share, then you start tiering your customer base, you start giving people different options. We are kind of at the next stage of evolution of our FWA plan. Third is churn. You know, we want, once you get to 90 days, our churn between Fios and FWA, there's some difference, but it's not material. The first 90-day churn in FWA is where we are focusing attention on, and we want to keep taking that down significantly, but again, a similar run rate that we see in the business. The third priority for me is our value business.
Look, this one has had some pretty big structural changes in the market. Two things I want to talk about. The first is shift from national retailers to exclusive distribution. You know, we have some really premium positions in you know, in national retailers in terms of distribution, Walmart being, you know, the prime among them. So there's been a shift. Customers want to go to stores, exclusive stores, and buy there, which is why we are scaling our TbV or what we call Total by Verizon. You know, we are almost at 700 stores. We almost started at zero last year, so it's one of the largest scaling, retail scaling that we've seen. And second is Visible. It's our digital-only brand, market leader, and doing incredibly well, that piece. Second is ACP.
You know, as ACP money came in last couple of years, it's distorted the market a little bit, you know, between pre- and post-, some of the pre- to post-migration has happened. So there are two structural headwinds. We've got our work cut out for us. I expect next couple of quarters, we've got... We know what to do there in terms of our plan. We do expect that business towards the back half of the year to stabilize and then see better results in 2025 as we work through it. The fourth is the brand. You know, we- I'm sure there'll be questions for Leslie, but our brand is centered around trust and innovation.
You know, we've done that, but look, it's time to refresh the brand, make an emotional, deeper connection, and you'll see us making pivots and changes to the brand as it comes along. Let me leave you with this thought: 2023 was about execution excellence. It's what Verizon was known for. It's what Verizon - you've modeled Verizon forever. That's how we ran the business. We are getting back to our roots, our fundamental focus on outcomes that we drive. We've laid some pretty big transformational foundations, whether it's with service, whether it's with our go-to-market, we're gonna keep continuing doing that. So with that, I'll pass it over to Jill. No, to Kyle, sorry. Kyle, yes.
Hey, guys. Hey, thank you, Sampath, and, hey, folks. Sorry I could not be with you in person today, but due to a bout of COVID last week, we thought it was best for me to talk to you from, you know, the studio here today. However, this won't dampen my enthusiasm for talking about the opportunities we have in front of us here in the Verizon Business Group. Let me hit what I believe are the five key takeaways from 2023. First, let's talk about volumes. As you saw in our fourth quarter results, Verizon Business continued to put points on the board. Our superior networks, whether that be wireless or wireline, along with our value prop and distribution capabilities, continue to resonate well across our customer base.
We had consistent mobility and FWA growth and performance across all three of our customer groups, Global Enterprise, Public Sector, and SMB. We reported 292,000 wireless retail postpaid net adds, including 131 postpaid phone net adds. This was the 10th consecutive quarter that we reported more than 125,000 postpaid phone net adds. We also reported 144,000 fixed wireless net adds, which now puts us well over 1 million total FWA connections. In FWA, we see both the core product is clearly hunting, and we are also seeing broadening use cases that our customers desire. Our 2023 results validate, once again, that business customers trust the Verizon network for their mission-critical functions and operations. Second, let me touch on pricing actions that we executed on last year. We lead in everything we do.
We are a premium product, and our pricing reflects that. We know our clients are very conscious of quality, reliability, and being there for them when they need us most. You get all of that with Verizon Business. We are a true partner and collaborator with our customers. Because we provide a service that our customers find compelling, and the fact that input prices have been rising, we decided we needed to take some price ups over the last handful of quarters. Our recent January pricing move represents the fourth pricing action we have taken since 2022, as we find the price value frontier in each one of our channels. Of course, we're always concerned about churn when we make these adjustments, but indications so far have been better than expected.
As a matter of fact, phone churn got a little bit better, Q4- over- Q3 last year. However, we're keeping a close eye on churn for Q1 based on the latest actions. Third, we're driving efficiencies and containing costs within the business. We are taking costs out by focusing on margin, leveraging the assets and talent we have around the world, not only in wireless, but also in Fios, Verizon Connect, IoT, and our overall global networks. One example of these initiatives is the partnership we created with HCLTech, which will not only drive efficiencies, but help us with customer satisfaction, new product development, and top-line growth. We are also shutting down products and services that are not helping us grow. This will allow us to refocus resources in the areas that will move the needle for us going forward.
An example there would be the BlueJeans shutdown that we are in the midst of completing. In the same vein, a big part of our wireline transformation is taking costs out and modernizing. The wireline side of the business has been seeing top-line declines for a while. Currently, in terms of revenue, wireline is a bit smaller than our wireless business. However, this segment is important to our overall value prop for our customers, so we are focusing on core products and assets we own while being very deliberate in writing margin accretive new business. At the same time, we've expanded the market through iEN and FWA, and we know fixed wireless access and private networks will have the potential to materially impact our revenue and EBITDA going forward. These offerings can also offset our wireline pressures.
While the headwinds we are facing in wireline still resulted in a declining Verizon business EBITDA year-over-year, we substantially reduced the drag through the actions we have been taking and will continue to take. In 4Q 2023, we cut the absolute EBITDA decline in half versus the previous year. Finally, at the end of the year, we announced a new structure that we feel will allow us to be more effective in driving growth outside traditional access and usage. We've established a complete product lifestyle management program driven by marketing. This structure will allow us to be more marketing-driven, product-oriented, and customer-focused. We'll be more focused on product channel fit, product portfolio yield, improved solution design, and economics, all driven with new systems, tools, and processes that we've created. We are creating areas of focus to generate opportunity.
So we are putting in the market is meeting our customers' needs while contributing to the bottom line. Now that we have 2023 in the books, what are we focusing on for 2024? Next slide, please. Our recipe is very simple, and it starts by maintaining our competitive edge using technology, scale, and focus. It's gonna come down to execution excellence on the things we started in 2023. If you look at this slide here, it really starts with Number 4. We want to continue to grow volumes. We want to grow our business in a way that is driving value for our shareholders, but we need to do the three things on the left to allow us to do that. First, it's about the customer experience.
We're working with our consumer folks and internally in our marketing organization to make sure we are making business, doing business with Verizon easier. Sometimes we're a little too hard to do business with. We're breaking down all those processes and make it simpler for our customers to buy services from us. The second is grow service revenue, and as I said, last year, growing above and beyond just access and the like, we want to bring new attaches and new products, new services, that our customers will find appealing, can help move their businesses forward.
And of course, keep driving efficiencies out so we can free up money and resources, so we can be competitive in the marketplace. So those are the four examples that I have and the four pillars that we have for our group this year, and we're gonna execute on those. We're in the early stages of the year. It's only the first quarter, but we have a lot of work to do through the year and to continue to drive the volumes, KPIs, and EBITDA that our business needs. So with that, I'd like to pass it over to Joe.
Thank you, Kyle. Appreciate it. So good evening, everybody. I'm Joe Russo. I lead the Network and Technology organization, and for my segment, there are four things I'd like you to take away, and then I'll get into some more of the detail. The first, and you heard it from Sampath and Kyle as well, but in 2023, we took deliberate actions that really produced measurable results in the improvement of the network that we serve our customers with. We saw that in our customer metrics, we saw it in third-party results, and the business units saw it in their results as well. The second is, I want to be clear on the investment decisions I'm making to put into the network are driven by two main things.
That's Number 1, to improve the experience for our customers, and Number 2 is to drive increases in service revenue. I'll talk a little bit more about why I'm being specific on those two things here in a second. The third is that although our capital intensity that we announced for 2024 is coming down, you should know I am not slowing down in our Ultra Wideband build with C-Band and millimeter wave. The fourth thing I'd like you to take away is that you'll hear, I'm ahead on all of our build targets, and that is a direct result of the culture of execution that my team has that I'm very, very proud of. Let me get into a little bit of the details around the deliberate actions that we took in 2023 on this next slide.
So the first one, similar to what you heard Sampath said, but early in 2023, we set up an 18-market structure within network, and this was getting back to a place where we had one leader in each of the 18 markets who has the accountability to build, operate, and optimize their network where they live, work, and play. They have the engineering resources, the operational resources, and a direct budget to influence the customer experience and the revenue growth in that market. And it's really proven to be an outstanding structure, and we're seeing great, great results in the results of the network. The second is that we are continuing our aggressive build of ultra-wideband, both with C-Band and millimeter wave.
Although I'm not building to cover POPs, I expect that in the next few months, we will blow past the 250 million POPs target that we set for the end of this year. We're a little over half of the way done of putting C-Band on the planned sites that we anticipated at the end of 2023. I'm very proud of the work that the team has done to build ahead of the capacity and capabilities that the business units needs, needed to hit their plans. Number three, and I think a critical differentiator for Verizon, is we doubled down on what I call optimization of the network, and that optimization has really led to the results that we've seen in 2023 for our customers.
We talk about our task force, if you've seen that campaign, but I have 3,000 engineers across these 18 submarkets that are absolutely focused on the customer experience day in and day out, and they are experts at building and operating a network. These is the same people who optimize the 4G LTE network that our customers know as the most reliable, and now they are very focused on optimizing the new technologies we've put in place with 5G. And then fourth is we've unleashed our multipurpose wireless network and coupled that with our Fios network here in our footprint to really drive broadband growth for the business. We are absolutely building ahead of the capacity needed for the business units to continue to deliver the 400,000 broadband adds a quarter, and my team is doing a terrific job.
Now we pass over 50 million households with fixed wireless access, and as Sampath mentioned, over 17.5 million OFS in the Fios footprint, and we'll continue that build in 2024. Then number 5, Tony and I talked about bringing down CapEx to $17-$17.5 in 2024, and I mentioned that we're not slowing down with that lower capital envelope. The way we achieve that is in 2023, three big capital programs are really now wrapping up. Our Core One Fiber build is now largely done, with over 50% of our sites now on our own fiber. The second is our 5G standalone core is now fully operational in an FOA. The third is we mentioned iEN, and that's a journey we've been on for several years.
We now have the iEN network fully operational, co-connecting our access network types to the core of our network. This enables me to keep the same pace we saw in 2023 with our ultra-wideband build in that lower capital envelope. Let me talk about my areas of focus for 2024, and a lot of consistency here. We are relentlessly focused on these five priorities. The first one, I suspect you know, and you've heard it really from all the speakers, but I think it bears repeating, which is our job is to wake up each and every day to build the best, most reliable, highest-performing, and secure networks. That is our mission. That's what my team does each and every day. That's where the structure and decisions we make each and every day are grounded in.
It is critically important and represents why more customers rely on the Verizon network than any other network in the country. It's also why we see our premium brand position resonating with customers, so it is absolutely my number one priority. And we are working to make the best network better each and every day by making sure we have the capacity before customers need it, and we're adding new 5G innovative capabilities to drive innovation and new customer experiences. So we will continue in 2024 to aggressively build Ultra Wideband, expand and own our in-building and venues with millimeter wave, drive growth in private wireless, and optimize the network even further like we did in 2023. The second is to advance 5G capabilities and products and new use cases for our customers.
You know, my team and I are really very focused with our partners to co-develop new applications, new devices, new use cases to unleash the power that we've put in the network. And as I said, we're just getting started on that. I believe there's tremendous upside in our 5G use cases. We're just at the beginning of what we're seeing. And we are absolutely seeing new form factors, new devices, more 5G-enabled devices that I believe will generate additional revenue streams in the future. And the third is, we call it best cost, but I don't mean lowest cost here. For me, best cost means outinvesting my competition by having owners' economics in our core, in our fiber backhaul. It's outinvesting because we're better at capacity management than others.
As Kyle said, we've also really turned up the crank on decommissioning lower utilized and legacy networks and reinvesting those dollars in areas of growth. The fourth is best customer experience, and you've heard that from all of us here tonight. Certainly, my role in that is large, in that the product is the network, and making sure that that experience is absolutely phenomenal is my job number one. But beyond that, I don't think it's sufficient just to have the best network, especially in this era where we are putting so much new technology in the hands of our customers. What we're hearing more and more from customers is they want to understand the network better, they want more transparency. They're using our network more and more for critical real-time business and personal applications.
So we are on a journey to continue to enhance our transparency with customers, make sure they understand when we're doing upgrades. Our responsiveness needs to be even faster than it was before when we have a problem. So there's a lot of work we're doing in 2024 to continue to build the systems and tools and capabilities, not only in our mobile app, but through our care channels, to ensure that we're improving the customer experience. And then last, a little bit of a tribute to our credo writer, Jim Gerace, here. But if you want to know what Verizon's all about, especially the network organization, I would encourage you to read our credo. But I believe that we have a competitive advantage based on the culture we have in our organization. As I mentioned before, we're mission-oriented.
We're here to deliver the best, most reliable, highest-performing, and secure networks for our customers. My team runs to a crisis. That's why our business customers rely on us more than others, and they're out there every day making the best network even better. And we just are continuing to build on that culture of execution and performance excellence. So I'll turn it back to Hans for a summary before the Q&A.
Thank you, Joe. Thank you. I think it's pretty clear that we have a very simple model. We want to grow our our wireless and broadband business. We're gonna focus on continuing to build the network, just extending our leadership on the network. We're gonna focus very much more on the experiences and our brand coming into 2024, and then we're gonna continue to take out cost. That's sort of the simple things that you heard from all of these when they think about what the priorities they have. I think you should expect from us, as always, that we deliver on our commitments. We have put out commitments for this year. Operational excellence is number one for us. You should also expect us to continue to be financially disciplined, very prudent on how we deploy.
When we see opportunity, of course, we deploy, but if we don't see it, we will not throw away money if it is needed. I think that all three of these gentlemen have proven that during the years, that we are really focused on doing that. We can also say that what we measure ourselves for, that's what we want you to measure us and all our shareholders. That's the growth on the service revenue. It's the expansion on the EBITDA and cash flow. That's how we are measured, and that's how we drive it. Then it's hundreds of other KPIs that needs to support that, but ultimately, that's how we would like to be measured by you and by shareholders. That's our incentive plan. So very important, that you should expect from us coming in to 2024, all of that.
And ultimately, you're saying something about the industry. If you don't think mobility and broadband is important, I'm not sure what you have done the last couple of years, just growing in importance. If you are not connecting in today's society, you can actually don't work, live, play as a consumer or as a business or as a government or as a small and medium business. There's no business I'd rather be in than be in this one.
This is the right business. We have the best assets to be in an industry which is so important for our society every day. We're a great team. We have a great strategy. Hopefully, you got a little bit more insight than when you... When Tony and I go through the financials in the earnings call, what we're doing and how focused the team is. That's it! And Brady, you're gonna—he gonna facilitate the Q&A for any type of questions, and I'm gonna be here and maybe answer some questions.
We're gonna try and do this in an orderly manner. Everybody's gonna raise their hand, and we're gonna. We have enough time to get to most everybody. I'm not sure we'll get to everybody, but we're gonna start. I'm gonna go... You've got teacher's pets in the front. We're gonna go middle with Simon to start off.
Okay, this, that's why he is telling you who's gonna take the question. That's all right.
All right. Well, thank you. Thanks for all the color. It's good to get this far into the presentation without mentioning AI, I think, at all. But I know Verizon's been applying AI for many years.
Yes
... even before GenAI, I came on. So I, I'd love to get a little bit perspective of how you're applying it in customer care. You talk a lot about customer experience. We've got the marketing angle, where you're looking at that. Obviously, network, huge opportunity, so maybe everybody could just touch a little bit on what you're doing in that area and what's the opportunity.
I can start, and I will ask Craig probably a little bit, but think about it, as you said, we have been on the AI for a long time, first of all, for our own operation. And you heard us talking about the efficiencies in customer care and things. Of course, we're using AI in that area. The other is, of course, developing products with AI that are more catered for our customers. We can talk a little bit about that. And ultimately, we see new service opportunities with AI. Given that AI will require a lot of compute and storage at the edge, there are opportunities to have AI there. We built 5G mobile edge compute five years ago and already ready for it. So there's three... They're different areas, and all of all of them are working with them.
In many cases, Craig is overseeing it, so we do it in an organized way, keeping the privacy of the data, being ethical with AI and all of that. So that's why we have a global services unit that is doing it. But they are driving efficiency, revenue growth, and new products. That's basically how it works. But maybe, Craig, if you want to add something on a fairly broad question.
It is a broad question. But thanks, Simon, and just to supplement a little bit of what Hans said. Again, as you noted, we've been using this for years, kind of good old-fashioned AI. Today, we ingest over 70 billion data points off the network every single day into our AI engines to give insights. We're using in our customer care. We're constantly enhancing the tools available to our customer care teams to kind of remove the cognitive load off of the customer care team, so they can use their real human elements there. Just two weeks ago, we rolled out tools to our employees. We're using GenAI that we've rolled out tools to our employees.
But I think the one thing I'd add, the huge opportunity that we have is, as we all know, AI and analytics engines are only as good as the data you put into them. We have an enormous body of data across Verizon, but it sits in 29,000 different data sources, which in many ways are fragmented. We don't have common taxonomy. So the journey we're on right now is bringing all of our data together into common platforms and common governance and taxonomy structures.
That will do a couple things. First, it'll take a lot of cost out, 'cause we spend an enormous amount of money just translating data, moving it from one platform to another. But even more importantly, it'll accelerate the speed at which we can operate, the insights from insight to... from data through analytics, to insight, to customer action. We're gonna see that rolling out just every week, every month, new capabilities as we bring our data assets together into more usable form, so.
Thank you, and, not sure, but, so you mentioned in your discussion also, we go brand and marketing, and of course, Leslie and I have discussed that, together with the business unit. If you're doing it segmented and want to be having even higher yield, AI data is gonna be so important, and I think that was also why we're lucky enough to attract, Leslie to come into our company with her background working with that. Anybody wants to add something, what you're doing in AI? No, they don't want to, because they're doing a lot.
Next question, next question. So I head faked the people in the front row, so we're coming to front row. So who's is it gonna be? We're gonna go, we're gonna go Walt in the front row.
Uh, thanks.
Hey, Walt.
In your final comments, you said management needs to be evaluated on revenue growth. So I'm not asking, just to be clear, I'm not asking a guidance question
But if-
But it's almost one.
Here comes the guidance question.
What, I mean, what is capable, I guess, in this industry? Can you ever get over 4% growth? Can you ever beat inflation in terms of growth? If we're evaluating you on revenue growth, is, is it just you set a target and meeting your target? Because a couple of years ago, I think the target was 4%. Is that the ultimate target to get to? Assuming, I know Sievert likes to say, "Oh, there's, you know, there's applications we don't know about that-
Oh, exactly. It's a good-
Assuming no applications appear, where, where can you really get revenue growth to?
No, it's a great question. Of course, we've done the guide for this year, and we are not changing that one. It's the same. But if I look in the future, using our asset, I mean, think about how much we are doing now with the distribution and how we are bringing ARPA up over time. I think there are opportunities for us with new services and applications to grow faster, and that's how we sort of are gearing ourselves to succeed with the network and the capacity we're building. So yes, I think we're gonna grow faster than that, but right now we're focused on making the guide for this year.
Faster than 4% or faster than what-
Faster than the guide that we have today over time.
Got it.
Yeah.
You can—you think there's opportunities—
But that would be obvious as we are measured on that, that we always try to do better than that.
Right.
Right now, we have the guide for this year, but I see opportunities going forward as well, and that's our job, to find those new opportunities, and definitely we are looking into it.
And then just one technology question which is, you gave stats about C-Band, 8% increase, whatever-
Yeah.
... not clear whether that differentiates you in market. It just says you're doing better in a C-Band market than your other markets. So let's just say it does provide some differentiation. What happens after C-Band?
A lot.
Yeah, so what, then what?
Now, we remember, we have a lot left on C-Band when it comes to different markets. Remember, we got the C-Band in the most dense places in the beginning, in the urban areas. Of course, now we go suburban and rural. Just creating new opportunities for us there as well. So I think that is a big differentiation, how we built the network, and not only the spectrum. Remember, we have been running with less spectrum than others over time. We still are the best network. Just this asset right now is making so much better, and we see the churn, the growth and all of that, and we believe that's gonna expand, and that is an important piece of us succeeding in our operation excellence.
So after C-Band?
It's always come something new. It's come five-year advance. You put millimeter wave together with C-Band, nobody else has it. So there, there's no stop on technology evolution.
Good. Okay, next, we're gonna go, we're gonna go back. We're gonna go Sam, the new guy.
Walt picked me.
Oh, okay. Oh, all right, all right. Barton, then Sam.
Well, Walt is this, Walt just decided that he-
Protecting the first row. Okay.
The only running the asylum now, Brady.
Yeah.
I guess if I could, this one would be for Sampath. Sampath, I think you elaborated a little bit more on, or maybe, Hans, you can address. There were two points that you talked about go-to-market.
Yeah.
One was that the regionalization structure would allow you to make, quote-unquote, "local adjustments.
Yep.
So I guess the intention was not to do price adjustments, so what does an adjustment in a local market look like that can make a difference in share? And then, if I could, the follow-up to that would be also, you're hinting at a brand refresh. The last brand I have in my head is Cecily Strong and Paul Giamatti, so who's next for-
Oh, okay. I will refrain from the second one. But the first one, and somebody will help me. But remember also that the market has changed over the time, so what you can do locally is, of course, building the local communities, having the right incentives, but pricing, of course, same. But the addition you can do locally in order to engage and sell products is enormous, and especially in today's society, where communities are more important maybe than the global United States, for example. And that's what we're seeing with the decentralization of it.
But remember, we decentralize the network, and the network is rolling out. So think about the market where fixed wireless access is coming because we're turning on C-Band. Then you can activate totally different local than you do in other markets. When it comes to Detroit, you don't have it in Houston, so do you do local marketing, local incentives, you add things to it with our strong brand. Anything you want to add?
Look, we, we don't want, you know, back to your point on regional pricing, it's not like every ZIP code is gonna have its own regional pricing. That doesn't scale well and has, you know, downstream and complexity issues. But what we have is promotions. You know, could we do slightly different promotions in regional markets? But it comes down to our share position. You know, in some markets, we have high share, and there it's about churn, so what tactics do we use, both from a promotion, but also from a sales, what I call sales approach, in the store, in our channels around churn. In some markets where we have slightly lower share, we go hard on acquisition. So our promotion and the buyers to which the stores sell have a different approach to acquisition. So it's different.
Second is also what type of broadband do we have? Some markets, we have Fios, which is literally the OG fiber player, so we get very different economics. Some, we have FWA. Some FWA is not there yet. So again, different tactics at the regional level to get to an outcome. And you saw that in the fourth, third and fourth quarter. The momentum we drove was because of that regional approach to get actions, given the asset and the customer base out there.
And one thing that I talked about to all of you several times, of course, that what we did also around 2023 and 2022, we start looking at the full investment in our customers, all the way from in promotions, what do you do for cost of acquisition, what do you do for cost of retention, and see that and media, and seeing that in one investment, and then being much more agile.
Hey, and that's what you're talking about. We can even do that on a local level. We're gonna do more retention in this market. We do more promotions or incentives here. All that is is another way to work, but it's just a reflection where the market is going. And we want to be agile because it's more important to be agile locally right now without losing the scale we have. There are many things we have been changing there. Thank you. On the brand, we will come back on that.
Yes. Sam, Sam's next in the middle, and then we'll see if Sam passes it or plays, plays nicely.
Hey, good afternoon, Sam McHugh from BNP Paribas. Just a quick one on bonus depreciation.
Oh.
Kind of a conceptual question, thinking about your decision tree-
Yeah
... for how you think about reinvesting some of that windfall, if you did, between-
The tax, yeah, tax. Oh, yeah.
Wireless capacity.
I was thinking about my bonus. Yeah, that,
All right.
That hasn't depreciated a lot lately, but continue.
Yeah. No, no, allocating it between kind of wireless-
Yeah
... capacity, it sounds like you're pretty well set. Fios passings have slowed a little bit, so maybe a bit there, or versus deleveraging. It's kinda just any, any kind of thinking about how you would think about those, savings.
Yeah, now we don't know if anything will be approved. It has to go to the next level in the government of the United States. I would say this is just a part of the fundamentals we have in our cash flow for the year. But let's see where it goes. I'm not sure if you we have any more comments, but we don't know. We just saw that Congress have approved it. Let's see what the Senate does. For us, it will not change anything in our capital allocation. Our capital allocation is the same. You know that, number one, invest in your business. Joe has talked about 17-17.5. That's what we do. Number two, 17 years of increased dividend.
We will put the board in place so they can continue. Number three, pay down debt. Every excess dollar, pay down debt. Then finally, if we come, or when we come, not if, when we come to 2.25, we'll consider buyback. Nothing has changed. So it's very clear, whatever excess we would have, that's the three we have. We have defined three, one, and two, I would say. We may see how much we will get for three, for the third part, and then let's see.
Good. Okay, we're gonna go that way. I'm gonna. I gotta go in the back. We'll go to Jonathan here, in towards the back.
I think you're doing this well, Brady, by the way.
Well, we'll see.
Thanks. I'm only asking this question because Kyle is sick at home with COVID.
We can patch him. He's gonna get patched back in.
We can patch him in.
No, no, no, leave him off, leave him off just for the, for the question. We can bring him back on after. But I'm wondering why you guys don't sell the enterprise business to Cogent for $1 .
Oh.
And I'm only half joking. If... I mean, the fastest way to get to 4% revenue growth is to get rid of wireline enterprise. And if you're as successful as you hope to be in with wireless private networks, that's gonna cannibalize that enterprise business further. And so why not just sell it and compete against it, get rid of the albatross, and grow faster, get a higher multiple?
Thank you for your theoretical comment. We work with anything we can see to improve our wireline business, and you rightfully said, many of the products we're bringing right now is actually offsetting some of the decline, and I think Kyle alluded that. We will continue to work diligently, and you know, we would look into anything that would even be outside, but right now, the focus is really to do it in our own regime, because I don't see much possibility for do something with someone else.
And remember, the customer base here is extremely important. We're not only serving them with wireline. They're usually buying a lot of important wireless product from us as well, and many of them are both government and large enterprises. So there's a lot on the customer base in our distribution as well. Rest assured, we're gonna do everything we can to see that we're managing that decline in the best way for our s hareholders.
Okay. All right, ready for the next one. We're gonna go-
I hope that Kyle will agree.
Let's go, Bryan Kraft, over here, close to Scott.
Thank you. I wanted to ask a question about fixed wireless.
Yes.
I know with home broadband being one of the strategic pillars that you've put up on the screen, I think you've got a target of 4 million-5 million subscribers-
Spot on.
By 2025. My question really is, how are you thinking about the ability to go beyond that subscriber target? You know, there's this, you know, fallow capacity model versus the ability to densify and expand the 50 million footprint. Millimeter Wave could play into this.
Yeah.
I was wondering if you could provide some color on how you see, you know, all that coming together to a longer runway for fixed wireless growth beyond that 25 target?
Yeah. No, you're right. We put out a target, and I think we have been more successful than we thought with fixed wireless access, because the product is just amazing, both from an NPS but also the simplicity of it and the capacity and the performance of the quality. We have said all the time, we will get to 4 million-5 million, and then let's discuss again, but our team is, of course, has built more capacity in the platform they are building, so they are prepared for that. I want to get there because we committed something. I want to deliver on the commitment. That's very important for us.
And then, of course, we will have optionality over time, what we do, if that would be other things, if we need to split sales or something, but that's not even close in this range that we're talking right now. And as said, they have built way more capacity in the network than the 4 million-5 million, and topping that with... We haven't seen the next generation, what we can do with 5G software, how we can include millimeter wave better, how we can address buildings.
There are many things we can do more over time with the technology of the network as well, which we have not factored in. So, rest assured, we will be very focused on it. It's a really good growth engine for us, and we want to take these broadband customers now, and that's why we have the service right now rather than waiting and have something else. So, feel good about that. I'm not sure if you want to say something, Joe?
The only thing I would add is when you talk about millimeter wave, we are absolutely looking at alternative ways to serve broadband customers using our millimeter wave, and we have some trials in place today that are proving to be very successful. So we think there's optionality there as well, especially in MDUs and businesses, et cetera. So that's the only other thing I would add.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great.
Thank you.
Okay. Let's see. We're gonna come up here at the front for Frank.
Thanks. I guess more from Sampath. So you, you've just got the sales quotas in place sort of at the end of the quarter. How will we know when that's, that you really got, got that going and when everyone's hitting quota, and are there any further adjustments to the sales operation you think you need to make next year as you, as it's, you know, a big part of the turnaround there?
Yeah. Look, we've put two things. We got the market structure in place. Again, think it's markets and then territories underneath that, so from national structure to region. So that one's done. Second is sales compensation. We moved from group comp to individual. So two of the foundational pieces are done. But third is there's still more work to do on the operational execution. You know, we are also teaching people to what we call book of business.
You know, sometimes when traffic is low in the afternoon, do we turn some of our sales teams to do outside calling? Do they call outside? Do they build their own book of business? Do they almost become mini managers of their own? That's the next upside that we are working on there. But it's again down to execution and floor management at the store that we are really good at, do that.
Is that another six or nine months to get all of that in, you know, place and kind of the team flowing, or is it sooner than that, longer than that?
Look, most of the things we put in, we saw one or two quarters of impact in last year. So you're gonna see the remaining of that impact in this year work its way through.... But again, it's sequential growth, as Hans said, that's what we want to do in our growth and momentum at the store piece.
Yeah, and what I ask him and the team working together with him is agility again. I mean, given that the size of our direct consumer, you need to be close all the time. If there are different incentives you need or different types you need locally, we need to be quicker, and that I think the team has proven the last three, four quarters, because we had sequential improvements in all those quarters, but it was a lot of decisions taken all the way from media spending, reducing, increasing, what we do on promotions, what do we do on retentions, and then, of course, what we do in incentives.
Everything that hangs together in an extremely tight process. What I'm really proud of is these guys have speeded up that process enormously, and that's what you see in our numbers, because ultimately, if you're first and knowing that... But the platforms is there right now to do it much quicker.
Yeah, and Frank, I'll add one more comment on that. You know, almost half our sales teams have never operated in an individual comp environment because they were hired, you know, either pre-COVID or just about COVID, when we had a group comp. Some of this training those sales teams to work in an individual comp environment, what does that mean? How do you manage your time? How do you do floor management? How do you upsell customers carefully? How do you take care of service? So there's a period of training that's going on as well. But again, half our sales teams have not worked in this environment before. So that's the work in front of me right now.
Yeah, and enormous training capacity they're going in and seeing that the teams are prepared, so yeah.
Okay, we've got time for a couple more. We're gonna go front row here with Eric.
Eric.
Great, I wanted to ask about the prepaid business-
Yeah.
And prepaid to postpaid conversion. I think Sampath talked about this. You know, it seems like we've seen some of that boost some of the subscriber metrics industry-wide the last couple of years. You have a big embedded base of TracFone customers. You want to get back to customer growth. How much could prepaid potentially contribute to your postpaid funnel as you look to get back to growth? Is that something that you're focused on?
I can start by saying, first of all, TracFone is, was an important acquisition for us. Think about our strategy. Build a network once, have as many profitable connection on top of the network, being able to serve all type of customers in the market, then you get the best return on invested capital. So it's very important that we can do it. So then we have had our challenges in the beginning. I think that Sampath is addressing them, but we also built up a couple of really strong prepaid brands that we didn't have before that is really performing. I think some of the TracFone brands, we still have work to do and work with our third partners. But Sampath?
Yeah. Eric, look, ACP has distorted some of the typical math in pre to post because a lot of other operators give pretty rich offering on the postpaid side using ACP dollars, and that tends to distort. So depending on where the ACP program comes, there'll be some stabilization of that. But if you see the pre to post, most of it happens from the mid-market to the postpaid side.
Yeah.
That's the reason why we are building Visible and Total by Verizon. That's the fundamental reason. It's at some point, those customers could become postpaid customers for us, which is why we are committing to stores, dollars, marketing investment to build those two brands. The bulk of our prepaid base tends to be on the slightly lower end of the market, which has slightly different pre to post dynamics. So we're gonna focus on stabilizing that, but building a mid, mid end of the prepaid business, which will give us, customers if they want to migrate to a postpaid environment.
I got time for a couple more. We're going to go... We're going to cut in over here on the right side.
Thanks. Two quick ones on fixed wireless. Joe, you talked about the 50 million of coverage today, and you hinted a little bit about fixed wire, on millimeter wave going forward. Any update that you could share on how we think about coverage in exiting 2024 or 2025, and what the mix might be with millimeter wave? Maybe a little bit more of a shorter-term question for Sampath. There's a lot of confusion in the market right now on the broadband side.
I think Verizon has been very consistent with the net adds on fixed wireless in FWA, but at the same time, you have some of the cable guys talk about incremental competition that they're seeing and how that's weighing on their results. And so are you seeing anything different underneath the hood in terms of where your gross adds are coming from, or, or what, you know, how do we reconcile from the outside what's going on here?
So maybe I help Joe a little bit on the first. Remember, Joe is measured on everything else, so he's measured on service revenue and EBITDA and cash flow expansion. So POPs are important, but ultimately, he should deploy fixed wireless access where you see those opportunities in conjunction with Kyle and Sampath.
You got it.
Thank you. Thank you. Sometimes I get it 50/50. Okay, you can speak.
Yeah, I'm... I thought you were going to help me, too.
No, no.
I was hoping you would help me.
I helped Joe a little bit. I don't help you so much.
No, I do.
So if you look, we've been very consistent on our broadband numbers. You know, Tony talks about the 400-ish numbers. We've been pretty consistent on it. If you break it down, there are two elements. One is on our Fios side of the business. I mean, what, you know, 250,000 net adds in a business with 17.5 million offices, that's a really strong growth in our business because the product is really good. On the FWA side, what we see is just the NPS. You know, when you come out of a product that has 30, that's competing with a product that has zero, two or one, it does make the value prop really exciting for the customer to do that. And third is we bundle.
You know, almost four-fifths of our FWA customers are our mobility customers, so we do a strong bundling of that. But our incoming on FWA hasn't changed much. You know, two-thirds tend to come from some wired service, you know, either, you know, fiber or cable, for the most part. We have a similar mix on urban, suburban, and rural that we've had before. So no fundamental piece, but our product is shining, you know, both on the fiber side and on the FWA side.
And look, we did a price increase in the third quarter, and we did tiering of the market. You know, we tiered it. We got a better premium mix than that. You know, I was actually expecting a slightly lower premium mix, but because the customers like the products so much, we saw a higher premium mix there. So again, very healthy on the ARPU side and on the quantity side. You know, as I said, a balanced P&Q business, that's what I want to build out in the long run there.
Okay, we're gonna do a couple more here. We're gonna do-
As we heard on fixed wireless access, the good thing with that, there are many products you can build in fixed wireless access. The different tiers on consumer, the different types of customers on the business side that are using. So it's a great product. It can meet so many different demands from the customer point of view.
So we got lots of hands still up. We're gonna try... I'm gonna do three more. We're gonna do Peter on the end, John in the middle, and then we're gonna end with Rollins on the end over there. So we're gonna go left, middle, right. Okay?
Convergence used to be a really big word. It seems like it's taken a breather. Thinking out several years into your future, what does convergence mean at Verizon, and what does it not mean?
Yeah. No, it doesn't mean that you converge two product and you do a discount. That doesn't mean that. What it means, of course, is that customers seems see a benefit of having multiple service from us. I think that's what it should mean. We have seen convergence, but still in a fairly small portion in this market compared on many other markets. I love our position because we have owner's economics on every type of product we have. We don't need to subsidize any of them. That means that we should be able to offer any type of solution for the customer. If they want to converge, we can do it. If they don't want to converge, we don't do it.
But we have owner's economics on both of them, but it doesn't mean that you put together two products and then say it's gonna be cheaper because you have two. Because we think our products are so strong and has such a lot of value, and I think that was also the change we did on the pricing in the third quarter on fixed wireless access, because we had a discount on. We took that away because we think these are so great products with such a great value, so they should be valued like that. But if some customer want to put them together, lovely. We have the scale of economies for that because we all own the network.
Okay.
Do you want to add?
No, thank you.
Thank you.
All right. John, in the middle.
I'll pass that one. Oh.
Thank you. Two, if I may. First,
Oh, you may.
Oh, you may. Hey!
First, what's the house view on ACP and whether that gets funded?
Yeah.
Second, Sampath, I think you said 7 million postpaid phone net adds for the year. I think we had 9 million for 2023. What... is there any sort of color you can give on w- First of all, how are you landing at that number, and are there any specific segments that you see slowing down?
First of all, I would like to start with the ACP. I would start what I said about the industry. This is one of the most critical infrastructures we have in the United States. 21st century, anyone in this country should be able to get broadband and, and, or wireless connectivity, because that's how you do business, how you connect with governments, whatever it is. So it is important. However, I don't know what's gonna be approved and not approved, but I think it's just in general, it's important that every citizen, every, every organization have a chance to be connected in order to be able to unleash and have the same way to compete. So I think that's important. Then we have the ACP, which we can comment on what we have and what, what we'll do with, with it. So, Sampath?
Let me answer your question on the market. You know, seven refers to the consumer book of business. When you add the business side, it's another 1.5 million-2 million, that gets back to 8.5 million-9 million number. But again, you think about it, it's a pretty good number for us. You know, of course, it's come down from the COVID highs of 11, but it's still a very strong number there, that we have going in. Look, on ACP, our exposure to ACP is largely limited to our prepaid side of the business.
You know, we have 1.2 million customers, and look, in the event ACP does go away, aka does not get renewed, we'll have some service revenue impacts, you know, in the $200 million, but almost no margin impact. On the postpaid side, we do have some exposure, but definitely something we can manage through it. We have plans as well as opportunities to go after that segment as well. Limited to no impact on the postpaid side. On the prepaid side, it's mostly a revenue piece, but there's no margin impact in there.
Okay. Then Mike, and then,
Rollins.
Pass the mic to Mike.
Hey, Mike.
Thanks. Hi.
Hi.
Also, two questions, if I could. The first one is, maybe to zoom out on your focus of extending the network and the convergence questions.
Yep.
When you do your planning, how important is it for Verizon to have a converged broadband solution to most homes and most businesses, whether it's fixed wireless to get there or fiber to get there, as you do the multiyear planning?
Yeah. No, it is an important piece given where the market is going. We have seen an increase in convergence, but still fairly low numbers in total. But we also understand that if our customers have multiple services for us, from us or multiple devices from us, that means also the loyalty goes up. So there is some benefits from it, so we always look for the opportunity combined. If we look at the market we're going to deploy, we look at both the wireless and the broadband solution and see, will that make our ROIC better? Because ultimately, we're very financially disciplined when we allocate our capital to see that we have the best return on investment. So of course, we measure that and see that that is a factor for us when we do it.
Okay.
And second, you mentioned B2B and IoT and some of the opportunities, managed private networks...
Yes
... for Verizon. What are the tipping points that we should be looking at from the outside to get a sense of getting closer-
Yeah
to materiality or trying to be able to size what that can mean for Verizon?
I first of all, I have to acknowledge I was too early on 5G mobile edge compute. I take that, but, you know, early means also we're a leader in this. I firmly believe in the opportunities to have managed 5G networks with application on top of it in order to get security, throughput, and low latency for it. So definitely see that. So what we see right now, think about it, that you do a simple replacement on Wi-Fi at the moment, fairly small, but when you do that, you start managing a logistics center. Then you have two opportunities from there, and that's where we are right now.
Either you do a vertical expansion, meaning you start a mobile edge compute applications on top of it, so it's much deeper how they're using the private 5G network to manage a factory logistics center. The other is, which is a little bit more common at the moment, the logistics center thought it was a good idea. They have 50 more, and they started doing in all 50. That's where Kyle and the team are scaling right now and seeing that we are as standardized as possible. One of the things that has been a challenge, but is going away more and more, is infrastructure for private 5G networks. We have all the infrastructures more right now, radios and so on.
Modems are coming, connected devices, not only phones, because you need laptops, you need pads that are connected, so all that has to work. It's still gonna be a while until it's a meaningful revenue on our $130 billion+ business, but as a substitution and as a total new term for us, it's very important, and we build for the long year. Verizon is gonna be in telecoms. As long as anybody can ever believe, we're gonna be the number one, as long as where we're gonna believe this is a long play for us to be in private managed 5G networks.
Okay. Okay, Hans, I think that's it.
That's it?
That's it, yeah.
Okay.
We're at time, so with that, we're gonna adjourn the webcast and conclude the webcast. We're gonna have a short break. We're gonna take some of the chairs out. You guys can use the restroom, and then we're gonna do at least an hour of mingling here with the executives. We're gonna have folks at different tables, so you can work your way around the room and catch anything from a wide array of topics.
Yeah.
We're all gonna make ourselves available, so thank-
With the purpose we said from the beginning-
Yep.
Get to know the team.
Yep.
Get some more about the priorities. Tony and I are gonna be here as well, but I think we have told you everything about the guide.
That's it.
Okay! Thank you, everyone, on the webcast-
Thank you, yeah.
Everybody in the room. Thank you so much.