Welcome back to Citi's Global TMT Conference. Just a couple of things to mention, that this session is for Citi clients only, and disclosures are available at the back of the room near the AV desk. We're excited to be joined by Verizon today, a day in which you have some news to share with us. And so thank you so much for being here and being a part of the conference. From Verizon, I'd like to welcome Sampath, CEO of the Verizon Consumer Group, and Joe Russo, Executive Vice President and President of Global Networks and Technology. Sampath and Joe, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks for having us here.
So the news of the day is Verizon's announced the acquisition of Frontier. So maybe the first question I'd like to ask for both of your perspectives on is, can you share with us the broader vision that Verizon is using to engage with the acquisition and think about how the assets for Verizon are going to continue to evolve over time, as well as the operating strategy?
Definitely. You know, before that, the safe harbor, you know, I'll point to everyone to the Verizon Investor Relations section, where we have a safe harbor. So I'll ask you all to read it, and this conversation is covered by that safe harbor. So I'll get started on our overall vision. Look, our vision, it's our fundamental strategy is around bringing broadband and premium mobility to American customers. That's been our fundamentals. Those are the two tailwinds we are running. Those are the big secular trends we are building on, is mobility and broadband. This is doubling down on that. So this basically expands a fiber footprint, you know, 7 million homes now, 10 million by 2026. So basically, by the end of 2026, we will have 30 million homes of the best fiber on Earth. So that's step one.
Then on top of that, you complement that with fixed wireless access. 60 million homes will have access to fixed wireless access. The combination of that is we'll be able to bring high-quality broadband to a large portion of America. Then on top of that, you overlay our mobility network. We are the number one mobility network, and when you combine the two things, you get incredible value, both for customers and for us. To give you a sense, when you bring wireless and fiber together, we see a 50% reduction in mobility churn. And then we also see a 40% reduction in fiber churn as well that comes with it. So incredibly strong value in this. The last one is for our Frontier customers, we'll be able to give them access to my Home and myPlan offerings. You know, that's a really...
It's a differentiated world-class platform where we have connectivity, we have perks that you can't buy from anywhere else, non-connected services, then access to our loyalty program, so we'll be able to bring that, and what we see is a 400-500 basis points higher wireless share in markets where we have fiber, so once we close on the transaction with Frontier and once we integrate, we'll be able to see those levels of share gain in the Frontier markets as well.
I think you nailed it. Yeah.
You know, thinking about the strategy then, so 30 million fiber homes, where does Verizon see the need for that fiber passing number to go over a five- to 10-year period? And are there other opportunities, either within this transaction or with other things that Verizon can do, to continue to expand upon the opportunity?
You know, we also have a very large fixed wireless access business. You know, we are committed to getting to 4 million- 5 million customers. It's available roughly around 60 million homes. Then when we get to 4 million-5 million in the next quarter, in this quarter and coming quarter, you know, we'll come back and talk about how we expand that footprint. So together with the 30 million homes of fiber and the FWA, we have a really competitive broadband footprint m ileage. And look, in footprint, we continue to add 400,000- 500,000 OFS every single year. There's definitely more opportunity to grow in that space because we've gotten better at managing costs, deploying faster, but also the benefits from mobility convergence that we typically haven't had before.
Yeah, I'll just add. So if you think about post-close, the combined entity will pass around 45 million homes in total, right? So as Sampath said, we'll get to around 30 million shortly after close. But as we continue to see our costs improve, technology improve, ARPU improve, penetration improve, you know, the opportunity beyond those, you know, we'll see how far it takes us.
Frontier's been talking about in the past, this, they divided their market expansions in waves. So they had this, like, wave three opportunity that they've been contemplating, which they said was on top of the 10 million target, at least another 1 million-2 million. As part of this, is there contemplation to accelerate and engage, for example, with that wave three opportunity?
Yeah. So I would say it's a little early to say at this point. We'll, you know, we'll have to get into that really more post-close, what the wave three looks like. But we're also looking inside our own footprint at what's next. And as Sampath said, you know, once we hit the 4 million- 5 million fixed wireless access, we've committed to come back and saying, "What's our broadband aspirations in both fiber and fixed wireless access?" So, stay tuned over the next couple of months for that.
There's a debate on fixed wireless, that it's only using up excess capacity. And over time, as the mobile business grows, it continues to eat into that. So fixed wireless is more of a temporal opportunity-
Yeah
... and fiber's the long-term opportunity. You know, how do you react, and what's Verizon's perspective on that, especially in terms of the durability of your fixed wireless?
Yeah. First let me start and just talk about... By the way, a 20-year Verizon Fios guy, right? So, but for a fiber builder, I love fixed wireless access for a whole bunch of reasons. First and foremost, our customers love the product. It's easy to install, great value, provides great reliability and performance. That's why we're selling so much of it, Sampath and Kyle. That being said, you know, it took us 20 years in our ILEC footprint to build out 18 million homes. It's taken me three years to cover 60 million homes. So it gives us this great opportunity to serve customers that are in all sorts of areas of this country. Somewhere, fiber may reach them someday or today, somewhere it doesn't.
Giving customers choice, to me, is a key aspect of fixed wireless access, and I don't see that as a short-term thing. I don't think every customer in the long term is going to want exactly the same kind of throughputs, products, you know, installations. There's all sorts of value in both fiber as a premium product and in fixed wireless access as a premium product in a different way. So we'll continue to invest in our mid-band rollout. That'll give us more addressable fixed wireless access over the next couple of years. And we'll see where the technology takes us. I mean, the thing I also love about fixed wireless access, comparing it to, you know, the days with DSL, is there's so much investment still happening in the technology of the radio access network.
So, I am absolutely looking forward to increasing our bits per hertz, increasing the way we can do beamforming and shaping. All of these kind of things give me more and more confidence in the long-term viability of fixed wireless access.
On the operating side, you mentioned a 50% reduction in mobile churn and 40% reduction in fiber churn. Churn rates for the industry are already, at least for mobile, like, postpaid phones, are fairly low. So, can you unpack a little bit more about what you're seeing in terms of that stickiness of customer? And does this implicitly mean there's an almost doubling of lifetime value for a customer on these bundles?
Yeah, there is a significant increase in lifetime value when two come together. And one of the ways we think about convergence is a little different from how convergence played out in Europe. In Europe, a lot of the convergence was supply-led because everyone had access to each other's network, and it was a race to the bottom for the large part. For us, the way we do convergence, it's revenue accretive, and it's EBITDA accretive, largely driven on the back of churn, as well as the ability to sell more services to the family or the home to do that piece. In many cases, we don't even do a single bill. We offer an affiliate discount on each other's bills between mobility and home to get to the right place.
I think there's a huge increase in a lifetime value of a joint customer, and I think it's only going to keep getting better. Lastly, look, we'll also bring the power of Verizon distribution. You know, in the Northeast, just about 1,000 stores just started selling Fios in the Northeast. Historically, we've not done that, and now we have an opportunity to sell that. Similar, once the Frontier deal closes, we'll be able to bring Verizon distribution to bear to a Fios network as well.
In terms of integration, so, the $500 million of cost savings opportunity, can you unpack that a little bit more in terms of the timing and drivers? And as you know, you divested a lot of what's in Frontier in the past, how would you rate the difficulty or complexity of this upcoming integration process?
Look, we may know a little bit about the network. I'll ask Joe to comment on that. But if you think about it, we think there's $500 million of run rate synergies only on the cost side, and roughly, we think about it, half of it is on the network, half of it is on the go-to-market and G&A piece, so it's pretty straightforward. We think it's going to take two to three years to get to the full run rate saving, and at the end of the day, this deal is accretive for us on EBITDA and revenue growth rates from the first time we close, and then after the first year, where we have a little extra cost to make the synergies happen, it will be accretive to EPS and free cash flow as well.
So it's a very rich deal for us in terms of synergies, and we have a clear path to going and extracting the piece. Lastly, we know these assets, and Joe maybe comment on that.
Yeah, and, you know, to your question, you know, integrations always take care. But this is a business we know. Not only because at one point we used to operate many parts of Frontier, but we've run an ILEC business since the beginning of Verizon. So we're very familiar with all aspects of what they do. Their network is very similar to ours. We think there's a lot of opportunity to integrate our Intelligent Edge Network into their access network. But generally, we see this as a really great opportunity to bring together the power of the Verizon network with all of the great work they've done to fiberize their footprint as well.
And you mentioned the difference in convergence maybe between here and Europe. You know, when you look at convergence and the benefits you've had from bundling and the overlap, you know, how much of the benefit that you see in the churn and the market share for mobile penetration, how much of that's been intentional, where Verizon's actually driven the outcome from a marketing perspective versus complementary, where just because Verizon has the brand, for example, in the Northeast, and you had the Fios in the Northeast, that it just created the advantage that you see?
I'm going to take that answer with FWA and fiber a little differently. In FWA, we were very determined to get that value from day one. Hence, 75% of our FWA base overlaps with our mobility base. We were very intentional about it. We put programs to make it happen. We had incentives in the field, and more importantly, the value prop for the customer made perfect sense to do that piece. They had access to our perks, they had access to our non-connectivity services on top of it. Makes sense. On Fios, it's only a 40% overlap, roughly, between the two. So we are just getting started on that journey, and we are being a lot more intentional how we bring our Fios customers and our mobility customers on the same platform.
And that's why you see on the stores, we just started selling Fios through an assisted sale in our Verizon stores in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic area. So I think it's a tale, a little bit of Tale of Two Cities, but overall, the thesis remains really strong for us, and once we close on the Frontier transaction, we would have learned a lot more, both on fiber and FWA, and would bring that to the Frontier base immediately.
And how do you contemplate... You talked about the benefits of churn and share, but the dilution and risk to ARPU, whether it's on a relationship basis or on a service basis?
Yeah. If you look at the discounts we offer both, they're quite minimal. You know, between, when you put a customer on both of them, we offer pretty minimal discounts. In the scheme of things, it's not a big thing. But what happens is, when the customer gets locked in with us, we are able to sell other products to that particular family or the household. For example, you have fiber as well as mobility customer, they tend to buy more perks. You know, whether it's Netflix, whether it's Max, whether it's Disney, whether it's Apple One, whether it's a cloud product, they tend to buy that. Too, they tend to buy a security and protection product as well. Verizon Home Device Protection, you know, Total Mobile Protection, product cloud.
So the overall ARPU actually ends up growing in the medium term as you do that piece. That's why I said, a converged strategy for us is accretive to revenue, accretive to EBITDA as well. That's why it's good business for us every single day.
Another question on the business segment, so you know, this has been an area that Frontier has been trying to lean more into. It's been a focus, you know, for Verizon, and I know you had prior responsibilities for the business segment. Where does the business side of the equation fit into the opportunity set, for this transaction?
I think Frontier has a very rich business segment as well. It's broken into wholesale and SMB, primarily. We have some space in the large enterprise as we define it, but bulk of their opportunity is in the SMB segment and the wholesale space. Some of that wholesale revenue was to us. That will get eliminated post the close of the transaction. But the markets in which Frontier operate are seeing really strong small business formation as there's more population growth in those markets. So you'll see us lean into that and build on that franchise of small business, but also bring the breadth of services that we have with Verizon to that base that's not been available too far. So a similar story that we see in consumer, we see going to play out in SMB as well.
Converged offerings bring Verizon products to the Frontier base and build on strong NPS. One of the things is, we like Frontier, because we are both playing on superior NPS. You know, our NPS on fiber is, you know, in the mid-30s, our NPS on FWA is in the mid-30s. Frontier is very close to catching up with us on that. So we are playing with... As Joe said, we know the network, they're complementary networks, very high customer satisfaction.
I'll just add one thing for the business customers, especially in the enterprise and the SLED space, the state and government. I think they're going to be very excited about this integration. Frontier tends to not play a lot in that space. We have the highest market share in both, and this gives us the opportunity to bring their fiber assets, their reach to those customers as well, and combine it with the global presence that we have in those two spaces.
And Joe, can you just remind us more broadly, you know, Verizon, over many years is a combination of several companies and assets?
Yeah
... and networks. Where is Verizon today on the journey of being fully integrated, simplified-
Yeah
- and efficient?
Yeah, it's a great question. Thanks. It's been a journey, because as you know, to your point, when you bring together multiple networks over time, it takes a lot of effort. Back in 2017, we started on this journey of really creating one converged network, that we can add services to and put as many profitable connections on as possible. We coined it the Intelligent Edge Network. As I mentioned, one of the reasons before that we brought down CapEx in 2024 is that project had largely completed. Our one fiber build-out, which was the converged fiber backbone for that Intelligent Edge Network, and our converged core for both wireless and wireline products, is now done as well.
So we're in a great position today with our Intelligent Edge Network to bring on other access points and more and more profitable connections, and, you know, our philosophy on building out that network is, we like own and operate, right? And it gives us really two major benefits. The first is owners' economics, right? Because I can make sure that I have the fiber I need for backhaul, whether it's wireless or direct to a consumer. So economics is clearly key, and the other is service performance. You know, I'm here to build the best networks, period.
And at the end of the day, we feel like by owning and operating the core and the access technologies, it gives us the capability to make sure that that end-to-end customer experience is where we expect it to be, which is better than the competition. So that's why the one fiber, the IEN networks, all give me that capability to make sure that, you know, even if you're getting great throughput or latency at the edge, that you're seeing the exact same through the core of our network. So we're very well- positioned, having completed that over the past several years.
One other question that's come up about the transaction is, you know, we're being asked by our clients why now? And, you know, if you could take us into maybe a little bit of a glimpse into those boardroom discussions, and as Verizon's weighing the opportunity for the transaction versus other things you could do with your capital, homegrown fiber builds, edge out, just repurchasing stock at some point, deleveraging. What got Verizon over the top that this was the right time and right opportunity?
If you look at our capital allocation strategy, this falls right within it, where step one is fund initiatives that drive shareholder value. That's the first step. Second, is put the board in a position to raise dividend.
Which we just did yesterday.
Yesterday. Third, pay down debt, and fourth is what's left we can consider buyback, so this aligns really well with our capital allocation strategy because we found an asset that has created shareholder value at the right price point, but from a strategy perspective, our goal was always to have a premium mobility and broadband network, and this gets us access to 10 million homes of fiber immediately as closed, so at some point, it was a build versus buy. We know the asset well, we know the standards they operate to, and as part of diligence, we've got a better look into it, so it made a lot more sense because it aligns with our capital allocation strategy.
We got, we feel, at the right price point, at the right cost, and then largely, it's core to our fundamental thesis of being the premium mobility and broadband provider in the country.
And pivoting back to the fixed wireless discussion. So, you mentioned, I think in an earlier forum, that you're up 60 million homes passed-
Yeah
on, on FWA.
Yes.
Is that the right number?
That's right.
When Verizon originally established 3 million- 4 million subscriber goal, can you share what the original coverage target was? And as you mentioned, you're going to give an update on where the three to four might go in the next couple of quarters, but maybe you can just give us a sense, maybe ahead of that, where the footprint's going to go.
Yeah.
You're 60 million today. Where do we see that going over the next few years?
Yeah. So I'll start because we have a mobility-first build when it comes to fixed wireless access. So I'll give you a sense of our Ultra Wideband deployment and then lead into how that plays with fixed wireless access. So we're currently building out the Ultra Wideband network, both with mm Wave and with C-band. If you think about C-band, we're about 60% of the way done of having C-band on our planned macro sites across the nation, which gets us to 60 million homes. Now, we started in more dense, urban and suburban areas, so now we're expanding into more rural, etc.
So you won't see the same number of homes for every macro that we used to get, but we'll continue to expand to really build out C-band to our existing mid-band footprint over the next year to two, and we think that'll continue to give us the opportunity to expand not only the fixed wireless access homes we cover, but as we've mentioned, come back and say, what do we think that next target is beyond the 4 million-5 million that we'll hit pretty soon here. So we... You know, for us, I think this plays very well with the end strategy I hope you're hearing, right?
It's about, you know, fiber, where we have it, where it makes sense, and it's fixed wireless access for those customers who choose that product or a place where fiber may not reach.
So if it were linear, 60%, 60 million, you get towards a 100%, 100 million. You said it's not linear because it's rural.
Yeah, it's not linear. It probably doesn't get to 100 million, but we'll see how far we can get it, and you know, depending on the success of the product, we have optionality. It's one of the things I love about my tools in my tool chest is, you know, I have fiber I could deploy, I have densification that I can do, we have small cells that we're now putting C-Band on, so there's a lot of optionality we have ahead of us.
Sampath, maybe pivoting over to the consumer side of the mobile business. So the goal for this year was to get back to positive annual postpaid phones. Can you talk about your progressions in that, and where you see that P x Q math shaking out over time?
Yeah. Look, our goal, and we are on track to be phone postpaid net add positive, with or without second number this year. That's our goal, and we have a clear line of sight of how to get there between now and the end of the year. Now, coming back to your question on how P x Q. As a large subscription-driven business, where we tend to have the highest market share, you want an 80/20 contribution to wireless service revenue growth. 80% coming from price, 20% coming from quantity growth. We are not there, but once we get to phone net add positive this year, next year, we're going to get very close to that 80/20 mix. Then let me talk about the 80 on price. That's kind of divided into two buckets. The first one is ...
You earn the price up, you upsell the customer, you go from a basic plan to a higher level plan. You sell them more perks, you sell them other services on top of the basic connectivity. That's where you get that price from. Then the other half of that is you are able to take price because we offer a better value, because Joe's network is deeper, larger. You know, we just added satellite as one of the value elements to the piece. So that's how we think about it. So 80/20 proportion between price and quantity over the last term, but we have a clean line of sight to get to phone net add positive this year.
If you see a momentum in the business, you know, we had 5% growth in growth adds on the first quarter, 12% in the second quarter, so we're gonna see strong performance on the growth add side. We have opportunity in churn. We've done a few price ups, and that has an impact. It pays for itself really well, but over a period of time, there's nothing structural that prevents us from being, you know, number one in churn as well. So that's the path for us to getting our, what I call, unfair share of net adds in the market.
You know, you broke down that 80% for us, and I think that the one of the questions that comes up is that 80/20 mix is a bit different than that longer term industry experience. Do you think the industry is just in a different position today, where as an industry, companies, including Verizon, are just better able to monetize the growing consumption and utility that these connections offer customers?
Definitely. You know, you see the market right now, the consumer market's gonna add roughly around 7 million phones. The business market's gonna add between 1 million and 1.5 million phones. So that's around eight, 8.5 million new phone lines into the market every year. Half of that is pre to post migration, prepaid customers going on to postpaid. So when you strip that out, there's, like, 4 million real customers, incremental customers coming to the market. Over a period of time, I see that 8 million number getting back to something closer to five or 6 million on a long-term basis as we work through that. That's healthy growth in the market, but we are reaching a phase where there is... most folks who have a phone will have, already have a phone.
So we're gonna look at how we create value on top of the network. We have a strong connectivity. We keep adding value, you know, satellite, we get better coverage with C-band rollout, and then we start selling more perks to them. We start selling more connected services, and basically increase our ARPA, our average revenue per account, in a meaningful way to do that. So deepen our relationships. That's why convergence is also important. We add broadband to that mix. We become a bigger share of the household, you know, spend on telecom.
You mentioned the growth adds that were growing first half of the year, the churn opportunity. So as you look at that 20% of volume, you look at getting positive this year and sustain that 20% contribution, you know. How should investors think about the growth add component versus that churn component?
Look, last year, when I took on this role in consumer, we put a lot of initiatives into place. To recap a few of them, we broke up the national sales structure. We went to a regional structure with six markets and then 55 territories under that. We changed sales incentives in the field, moved away from group compensation to individual compensation. We moved resources and investment from national marketing to a lot of local marketing efforts. And then we launched myPlan, which we think is a great platform for long-term growth. Most of those efforts have all been rolled out. We still have a few quarters of impact left on that, but we could continue to see some growth add momentum in our business going forward as well. The other metric I'd look for is capture rate.
You know, what of the subs that are available to us, what we capture. We are seeing a good increase in our capture rate there, so we've got more gains to have on growth add, but we're gonna have to spend more time and resources on our churn, and a combination of those two gets us to a really good place on net adds.
Upgrades is a big question that's been coming up, and for Verizon, there's actually a second part to the question, I think, following on the churn discussions. The first part is, how do you see the upgrade environment? Do you think that we're getting into a super cycle, whether it's this year or next year, and what's Verizon's go-to-market for that?
Look, all I can tell you is there's a cycle. I don't know if it's a super cycle or not. A customer keeps the handset not for 40 months today, and what we tend to see is there are two drivers of customers wanting new handsets. The first one is, as Joe calls it, a new G, 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. So you get a new G, you tend to... There's a cycle, and we saw that in 2021, 2022 and 2023, where we had, you know, elevated levels of that. The second one is in hardware form factor, different features, different hardware that you can see, touch and feel. Those two have typically been drivers of upgrade, of elevated upgrade levels.
I don't know what the OEMs are going to have between now and the end of the year on the hardware features there. So we don't at current course and speed anticipate any really elevated upgrade rate level. The last point is, we've also been very careful about personalization. Instead of pushing upgrades to customers, we want more of a pull, where certain customers want it, certain customers don't. So we're very careful, and part of it is being a very disciplined financial operator and not push upgrades where it's not needed. And then I'll close this topic with talk about the correlation between upgrades and churn. Historically, the correlation between upgrades and churn have been pretty high, but right now what we see is we have other tools at our disposal to control churn.
Mobile plus home is a very large tool, as we discussed. Adding more perks is another tool, looking at some loyalty discounts, better customer experience, better loyalty programs. So we have more tools at our disposal than just throwing upgrades at the problem. So a combination of all of this suggests we don't see a super cycle this, but you know, we'll have to wait and see what the OEMs offer.
You touched on what the second part was, the push side, 'cause whether it is to get churn down or, Joe, you know, from your perspective, whether you want to just get more customers on 5G and the most-
Right
Modern phones, you know, sometimes there's an incentive for carriers to push on this. So, we had that early push a few years ago when 5G was first introduced. Is there any perspective to share on the, beyond what you just shared, the interest to push at some point or other?
Yeah, I'll start by, you know, just highlighting that, the 5G adoption of devices that can take advantage of our Ultra Wideband network and the spectrum we have, has been the fastest adoption we've seen in any of the Gs. So I think we're up to 80% or so of our customers who have a device that takes advantage of the network that we've built. So there's not a big need to push, because we've already kind of gotten to a great place, where we're leveraging the spectrum and the capacity that we've put into the network. But I'm going to bridge a little bit those last two questions, because part of my job at Verizon is to create technology that drives future value.
And I, you know, everything we've talked about so far is a little bit rooted in where we are today. And my view is that over the next, you know, several years, it's not tomorrow, we will see with 5G Advanced features, with AI continuing to advance, with potentially new form factors that take advantage of both of those things, with the Mobile Edge Compute network that we've built, that provides compute at the edge with low latency and high throughput. I envision that both for the enterprise and the consumer, that we will start to see new use cases, new applications start to emerge, that the 4G network could not do.
And today, it's largely been a fixed wireless access story, but part of the efforts we're putting in with partners and others is to build out those kind of capabilities that allow for new form factors, new applications, to work in a mobile setting. So we'll see what comes over the next couple of years, and then I'll be pushing Sampath to sell it.
So it sounds like you have an optimism that some of the B2B, the IoT, the MEC, that was part of the 5G opportunity is still in front of Verizon and the industry?
Absolutely, I do, and we're seeing the momentum. Kyle and his team are putting more and more private networks in place where we either leverage our MEC network or put private MEC in those private network solutions, and what I see that really excites me is that when we give customers that private 5G network, usually we're solving one use case, maybe two, and within months, they come back to us and say: "We think this can solve this, this, and this as well, and we're adding more capabilities, we're bringing in more use cases." So we're building on the successes we've had, and that momentum is absolutely starting to build. You know, big enterprises, it takes a while to adopt new technology. There's big change outs that they have to do.
The device ecosystem has to catch up, et cetera, but we see a lot of momentum in that space.
So I'll try to squeeze in two more questions. So, you know, one that's a broader question for a lot of the companies here, this week, is GenAI. And, you know, do you view that for Verizon as a larger revenue opportunity or a larger opportunity to reduce costs? And which is, you know, going to create the most value for Verizon?
Yeah, we see it as both. We have really a, what I would say, a three-pronged strategy around AI. The first that we're focused on the most is to be the world leader in applied AI inside of Verizon. So Sampath and I, as an example, are both using it pretty heavily and at scale, in both our customer service and our network experience. So the way we do both capital management, network management, the way Sampath is answering calls now more efficiently and effectively, freeing up our agents to be more, on the phone with customers and less searching for, you know, information. So we're applying AI inside of Verizon to gain better customer experience and efficiency. So that's the first pillar. The second is using AI in our products and applications, right?
So this is everything from our web page, to our cloud platform, to our enterprise solutions for IoT, just integrating these kind of capabilities to make the products better, faster, and more appealing to customers. And then the third is a little bit what I talked about before, which is what are the new products and opportunities that we see developing, both in the enterprise and potentially in the consumer space? Whether that is, you know, personal assistance, you know, kind of mobile applications, whether it's, you know, on-prem private networks, where, you know, customers are putting their models, you know, on their prem, for various use cases. So, that's the third place. It's a little early on that, but, that's the third place we're focused on as well.
Great. And just maybe to wrap up with a big picture question. So Sampath, since you run the consumer group, can you share, based on all the efforts of you and the team and all of Verizon, is the consumer group in a position where you can deliver sustainable annual service revenue growth?...And then with that, have some operating leverage and actually then grow that EBITDA for the segment even faster than the service revenue.
I'll point to the second quarter results. You know, we had 3.7% wireless service revenue growth, and that translates to even better EBITDA growth on that. That's the canary in the coal mine in a good way for us to think about the business. On service revenue, we have a few things working for us. One is, as Joe builds out C-band mode, we tend to get better premium mix, lower churn, a higher gross add, and he's not done. As he said, he's only 60%-70% done. So as that works its way out, we'll do more of that. Second is broadband, whether it's fiber, whether it's fixed wireless access, that's a huge tailwind for us. And the third is our offering structure, which is my Home and myPlan. That is designed to drive higher ARPA in the business.
Because we start with connectivity, get customers on a premium network, premium network offering, and then build on top of that, a combination of that, and then we didn't talk about our prepaid business, so one of the things is, you know, we've kind of gotten towards the end of our TracFone integration, and this quarter will actually be phone net add positive in our prepaid business, when you exclude the SafeLink piece, so huge turnaround in that, so you have support from our prepaid business, our postpaid business, and then we have a reseller business as well, that is doing quite well, so a combination of all of this gives us really strong support for continued sustainable wireless and overall service revenue growth for long term. Second is on cost. We are very careful about cost of acquisition, cost of retention.
We are financially incredibly disciplined on how we go and manage those numbers, pretty much on a weekly basis. So when you look at those two, a healthy customer, a premium customer base, more products to sell in a converged environment with good financial discipline on cost, that very quickly yields to EBITDA growth on the bottom line. So we feel very comfortable. Again, the work's not done. We have a lot more work in front of us, but we really like the shape of the business over the last couple of quarters. It's exactly the direction we want it to be in.
Thank you for sharing your time with us, especially on such a busy day for Verizon. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you much.