Hello and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results discussion. I'm Brady Connor, and on this recording, you'll hear from our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Hans Vestberg, as well as our Chief Financial Officer, Tony Skiadas. Before we begin, I'd like to draw your attention to our Safe Harbor Statement, which can be found at the start of the earnings presentation posted on our Investor Relations website. Information in this presentation contains statements about expected future events and financial results that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties.
Discussion of factors that may affect future results is contained in Verizon's filings with the SEC, which are available on our Investor Relations website. This presentation contains certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the financial materials posted on our website.
A detailed overview of our fourth quarter and full year results and other materials related to this discussion were posted this morning to our Investor Relations website. Additionally, we hope you'll join the webcast of our discussion of the earnings results and business update that starts at 8:30 A.M. Eastern Time today, January 24th. With that, I'll turn it over to Hans.
Thank you, Brady. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings update. We had a year of strong growth with a great fourth quarter finish. The team executed our strategy well, transforming Verizon into a more efficient and effective company, which is reflected in our solid operational and financial results. This demonstrates our commitment to continuous improvements as we strive to empower our people, live, work, and play. We delivered on our 2024 financial guidance.
Wireless service revenue and Adjusted EBITDA exceeded the midpoint of our guided ranges, and we generated strong Free cash flow. We grew wireless service revenue sequentially for the 18th consecutive quarter and grew year-over-year Adjusted EBITDA every quarter in 2024. Our network, product portfolio, and brand are resonating with our customers and driving growth for us in the market.
We're excited about 2025 and look forward to building on the strong execution and the solid results delivered in 2024. Let me start with our strategic moves in 2024, which position Verizon for long-term growth as we better serve our customers with control, simplicity, and value. These include refreshing our brand, introducing customer-first offerings like myHome, Verizon Access, and Verizon Business Complete, accelerating our broadband expansion with the pending acquisition of Frontier, and signing strategic transactions including the Tower deal and the agreement to acquire U.S. Cellular spectrum.
We extended our network leadership even further. We announced satellite partnerships with AST SpaceMobile and Skylo to offer connectivity in dead zones, and as you will hear more later today, we're connecting the AI ecosystem, putting Verizon at the forefront of the next generation technology. We continue to invest in the business.
We have now deployed C-band on nearly 70% of our planned sites and expect to be within 80%-90% by the end of 2025. C-band deployment continues to improve our customers' mobility experience while expanding fixed wireless access coverage. At the same time, we continue to expand our Fios footprint with 464,000 new premises open for sale. My new leadership team, which came together over the last 12 months, has performed very well and has continued to transform the business and drive efficiencies while improving our operating leverage.
With the execution of the voluntary separation program, we ended the year with fewer than 100,000 employees, down close to 20,000 over the last three years. This gives us more flexibility to execute our strategy and deliver on our capital allocation priorities. These strategic moves and operational improvements drove strong financial results.
Total wireless service revenue of $79.1 billion was up 3.1% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA of $48.8 billion was up 2.1%, or a billion dollars year-over-year. And we generated strong free cash flow of $19.8 billion while absorbing higher taxes. Given the financial strength of our business, we increased our dividend for the 18th consecutive year while maintaining a healthy free cash flow dividend payout ratio of approximately 57% and continued to pay down debt, ending the year with a net unsecured debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio of 2.3x , down from 2.6x a year ago.
Turning to our operational performance, we grew subscribers across all our core businesses for the full year. We added nearly 2.5 million postpaid mobility and broadband subscribers in the year while expanding our margins. On mobility, we added nearly 900,000 postpaid phone subscribers. Consumer postpaid phone net adds were positive for the year.
Business postpaid phone subscribers' growth continued with another year of solid performance with over 500,000 net adds. Prepaid net adds, excluding SafeLink, were also full year positive for the first time since the TracFone acquisition. It's been a great turnaround by the Consumer team. On broadband, we added nearly 1.6 million subscribers in 2024, bringing our base to 12.3 million. Our growth was fueled by great momentum in both fixed wireless access and Fios. We have the most complete and differentiated broadband offering, covering all segments of the market.
As announced in October, we expect to cover more than 100 million homes and businesses nationwide over time. Our private networks business continues to scale, with significant wins across key verticals. In early 2024, we were selected for an IT system modernization project from Xerox and a private network build for global power solutions leader Cummins Inc.
In sports and entertainment, we expanded our service from every NFL stadium in the country to individual teams and the training facilities. We won new mandates from FIFA to support the 2026 Men's World Cup as the official telecommunications service sponsor with state-of-the-art technology, and we expanded our partnership with Madison Square Garden.
This month, the United States Air Force chose us to enhance its communication infrastructure across 35 bases, which will include new C-band deployments. In summary, 2024 was a year of strategic execution with strong financial and subscriber growth. Now, let me turn to the fourth quarter. We had a very strong quarter, both financially and operationally, with subscriber gains in both mobility and broadband. We continue to gain share in broadband, led by sustained growth in fixed wireless access. Wireless service revenue came in at $20 billion, the highest in the industry, up 3.1% year-over-year.
Adjusted EBITDA was $11.9 billion, up 2.1% year-over-year. We ended the year with a strong free cash flow of $5.4 billion for the quarter. Our subscriber growth demonstrated clear momentum. We added nearly 1 million postpaid mobility and broadband subscribers, our highest quarter result in over a decade. In mobility, total postpaid phone net adds were 568,000, our best quarterly performance in five years. This was driven by strong execution in consumer and continued strength in our Business segment.
Our total postpaid phone net adds improved year-over-year in every quarter of 2024. In our Value business, excluding SafeLink, prepaid net adds of 65,000 in the fourth quarter brought us into positive territory for the year. Our broadband business continued to scale effectively. We delivered 408,000 net adds, including 373,000 from fixed wireless access.
We ended the year with nearly 4.6 million fixed wireless access subscribers, and we exceeded $2.1 billion of fixed wireless access revenue for the year. We're off to a great start to hit our next milestone of 8-9 million fixed wireless access subscribers by 2028. Finally, in addition to the new private networks business that we won in the fourth quarter, we were the only U.S.-based carrier to be named a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for private networks.
Gartner recognized us for our vision, our work in building the private networks market, and our ability to build great private networks that our customers rely on. On network, our capital efficiency continues to improve as we roll out our fiber and C-band ahead of plans and transform our network. Where we have C-band deployed, customers are experiencing superior performance, and we're seeing higher gross adds and lower churn.
We continue to enhance our network capabilities and innovate for the evolving needs of our customers. We recently launched enhanced video calling powered by Network slicing, and we collaborated with NVIDIA to power AI workloads on private 5G networks with Mobile Edge Compute. We also successfully tested next-generation technology, enabling faster and more energy-efficient fiber network data transfers. Our continued advancement further strengthens our position as the best network for all of our customers.
Looking ahead to 2025, we'll continue to build on our momentum and execute our long-term strategy. We'll focus on growing wireless service revenue, expanding adjusted EBITDA, and generating strong free cash flow. We will accelerate our mobility momentum and broadband growth with continued deployment of 5G Ultra Wideband and expanded fiber builds while scaling our private networks business.
We will maintain our focus on operational excellence, financial discipline, and customer experience to drive both customer and financial growth. We will continue to execute on our capital allocation model by investing in the business, supporting and growing our dividend, paying down our debt, and eventually executing on share repurchases. We will leverage our extensive fiber footprint and edge compute assets to open new revenue streams as we continue to connect the AI ecosystem.
Tony will provide more details on our 2025 guidance, but we anticipate another year of strong wireless service revenue growth in the 2%-2.8% range, with underlying growth expected to be nearly double the guided range when excluding promo amortization. Our Adjusted EBITDA profile will continue to improve as we remain financially disciplined and execute on our business transformation programs.
The midpoint of our Adjusted EBITDA guidance represents an acceleration from our 2024 growth rate. We expect to generate strong free cash flow while investing for long-term growth. Now, I will hand it over to Tony to discuss our financial results.
Thanks, Hans. Good morning. We finished the year with strong operational momentum in both mobility and broadband, demonstrating year-over-year improvement in postpaid phone net additions throughout the year. In addition, we delivered our highest broadband quarterly result of the year. All in, we added nearly 1 million postpaid subscribers onto our mobility and broadband platforms in the fourth quarter, the highest quarterly result in over a decade.
We did this while delivering on our financial guidance, including finishing above the midpoint of the guided ranges for both wireless service revenue and Adjusted EBITDA, and generating strong cash flow.
These results reflect our disciplined approach to growth and position us well for continued success in 2025. Consumer postpaid phone net adds totaled 426,000 for the fourth quarter, a substantial improvement from 318,000 in the prior year period. For the full year, we delivered 82,000 consumer postpaid phone net adds, excluding the impact of our second number offering, meeting our goal of positive net adds for the year. Volumes are important to delivering our growth objectives. We expect to build off the momentum exiting the year and deliver even more postpaid phone net additions in 2025.
We also intend to transition our second number product to a perk offering within the next few months. As a result of that change, beginning in the first quarter of 2025, we will no longer count second number in calculating postpaid phone net adds and other phone metrics.
The strong consumer postpaid phone results in the quarter were primarily driven by postpaid phone gross adds, which were up more than 5% compared to the prior year period. The quarterly phone gross add result was our strongest in five years. Customers continue to be attracted to our MyPlan offers, with nearly half of our phone base on MyPlan at year-end. In addition, our C-band expansion, segmented go-to-market approach, targeted promotions, and operational focus all contributed to our strong performance.
Consumer postpaid phone churn was 0.89% for the fourth quarter, up slightly versus the same period a year ago, reflecting pricing actions taken during the quarter. Churn management will remain an operational focus for the business in 2025 as we continue to pursue a balanced growth profile between volumes and price.
The consumer postpaid upgrade rate was 4.5% in the fourth quarter, up 10 basis points year-over-year as a result of the approximately 3% increase in upgrades. While upgrades increased year-over-year for the first time in several quarters, we do not see a significant change in consumer behavior as customers continue to hold on to their phones for longer periods of time. Consumer ARPA of $139.77 in the fourth quarter represented an increase of 4.2% year-over-year. This was primarily driven by pricing actions taken throughout the year, growing perk adoption, and fixed wireless access subscriber growth.
We expect continued healthy ARPA growth in 2025. Our prepaid results showed continued momentum in the fourth quarter. Excluding SafeLink, we had 65,000 prepaid net additions in the fourth quarter, leading to positive full-year prepaid net adds.
Our strategy is working, and we continue to invest in the Straight Talk, Visible, and Total Wireless prepaid brands. We expect to see continued improvement in 2025, with the financial contribution from prepaid expected to turn to a tailwind towards the back half of 2025. Verizon Business delivered another strong quarter with 142,000 phone net adds. Our value proposition continues to resonate across all customer groups, with particular strength in small and medium businesses.
This is evident as we continue to retain our leading market share and reported a year-over-year improvement in business phone churn for the full year of 2024. We are confident that we will continue to deliver strong business volumes in 2025. Moving on to broadband, we delivered 408,000 net additions in the quarter, continuing the quarterly pace of over 350,000 broadband net adds.
We are taking broadband share and continue to see strong demand for both our fiber and fixed wireless access offerings. We are confident that both Fios and FWA will continue to grow market share in 2025. Key initiatives driving our optimism include expanding our Fios footprint by up to 650,000 new locations and further deploying C-band spectrum. In addition, we anticipate bringing new products and offers to the market, such as our MDU solution for fixed wireless access that will be launched in the next few months.
In fixed wireless access, we delivered 373,000 net adds for the quarter, growing the base to nearly 4.6 million subscribers. In the fourth quarter, we saw a higher proportion of consumer fixed wireless gross adds coming from suburban and rural customers, showing the high demand for quality broadband services in our newer C-band markets.
We're off to a great start towards achieving our 8-9 million subscriber goal by 2028 and see continued opportunities to grow as we expand our C-band footprint. Fios internet net adds for the fourth quarter were 51,000 versus 55,000 in the prior year period. With 20 years of Fios experience, we continue to grow our fiber subscribers while others face challenges. Let's now look at our financials. Consolidated revenue for the fourth quarter was $35.7 billion, up 1.6% year-over-year.
Service and other revenue grew 1.8%, driven primarily by wireless service revenue growth, partially offset by ongoing business wireline declines. Total wireless service revenue was an industry-leading $20 billion in the fourth quarter, up 3.1% year-over-year. Revenue growth benefited from targeted pricing actions, customer growth, sales of perks and add-on services, and growth in Fixed Wireless Access.
This was partially offset by the pressure from promo amortization as well as prepaid revenue. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $11.9 billion, an increase of 2.1% compared to the prior year period. The increase was driven by higher wireless service revenue and benefits from cost savings initiatives, which were partially offset by investments to drive growth and legacy wireline revenue declines. Notably, Business segment EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $1.7 billion, up 3% year-over-year.
This represents the first year-over-year increase in quarterly EBITDA for the business segment since the fourth quarter of 2020. Adjusted EPS was $1.10 in the quarter, up 1.9% year-over-year, resulting in full-year adjusted EPS of $4.59. Turning to our cash flow summary, cash flow from operating activities for the fourth quarter was $10.4 billion, bringing the total for 2024 to $36.9 billion.
For the fourth quarter, it's important to note that we received approximately $2.8 billion in proceeds from the Vertical Bridge tower deal, of which approximately $2 billion flowed through cash flow from operations. The remaining proceeds flowed through cash flow from financing activities. In addition, we made severance payments related to our voluntary separation program of approximately $600 million. CapEx for the quarter came in at $5.1 billion compared to $4.6 billion in the prior year. The full-year CapEx totaled $17.1 billion, down from $18.8 billion in 2023.
We came in at the low end of our guided range, supported by efficiencies in our C-band build-out and fiber expansion activities. Free cash flow was $5.4 billion in the fourth quarter and $19.8 billion for the full year of 2024, including a net positive impact of $1.4 billion from the tower transaction and voluntary separation payments.
This result shows very strong underlying cash flow generation in the business, given that we paid $3.3 billion more in cash taxes in 2024 than in 2023. Net unsecured debt at the end of the quarter was $113.7 billion, a $12.7 billion improvement year-over-year, and better by $7.7 billion sequentially. Unsecured debt decreased sequentially, primarily due to a debt tender offer of $3.3 billion, the repayment of $1.2 billion of maturing notes in the quarter, and mark-to-market adjustments.
Our net unsecured debt to consolidated Adjusted EBITDA ratio was 2.3x at year-end, down from 2.5x last quarter as we continue to focus on our debt reduction ahead of the closing of the Frontier transaction in alignment with our capital allocation strategy. Now, let's look at our 2025 guidance, which, similar to 2024, reflects our commitment to wireless service revenue, Adjusted EBITDA, and cash flow growth.
For 2025, we expect total wireless service revenue to grow between 2% and 2.8%. We expect the growth to be driven by anticipated postpaid phone net additions in both consumer and business, fixed wireless access subscriber growth, perk adoption, and pricing actions implemented in 2024 that carry over into 2025. We anticipate significant promo amortization headwinds to impact wireless service revenue growth in 2025.
Please note that, beginning in the first quarter of 2025, we are reclassifying recurring device protection and insurance-related plan revenues from other revenue into wireless service revenue. The reclassification of more than $2.9 billion better reflects that these products represent values our customers receive that is complementary to our connectivity services. Where applicable, historical results will be recast to conform to the updated presentation. The midpoint of the guidance implies $2 billion of wireless service revenue growth over a higher base of revenue.
Consolidated adjusted EBITDA is expected to grow 2%-3.5% compared to 2024. This outlook reflects higher expected wireless service revenue and benefits of ongoing cost transformation initiatives, partially offset by continued pressure in business wireline revenues. Full-year adjusted earnings per share growth is expected to be between 0% and 3%, reflecting the adjusted EBITDA growth, partially offset by higher depreciation and amortization. As we discussed in October, capital spending for the full year is expected to be between $17.5 billion and $18.5 billion.
That is an all-in number that includes all of our growth initiatives, including accelerating our Fios expansion. We expect free cash flow in the range of $17.5-$18.5 billion in 2025, which assumes mid-single-digit growth and upgrades and no change to current tax legislation. Please note that our guidance excludes any impact from the pending acquisition of Frontier.
We're currently working with all the regulatory bodies that must approve the transaction. The process is going as planned, and we continue to expect the transaction to close by early 2026. In summary, we delivered on our financial guidance and remained disciplined with our capital allocation approach. We exited 2024 with good momentum in both mobility and broadband. Overall, we are pleased with how we performed in 2024 and look forward to extending our leadership in 2025. With that, I will now turn the call back over to Hans for his closing thoughts.
Thank you, Tony. Let me close by saying I'm proud of everything we accomplished in 2024. Our team delivered strong results through disciplined execution and relentless customer focus. We strengthened our network leadership, transformed our operating model, and positioned Verizon for long-term success. We entered 2025 with clear priorities and momentum across our business.
Our network advantage continues to grow, our cost transformation is delivering results, and we're capturing opportunities in mobility, broadband, and private networks. We will maintain focus on our three key financial metrics: wireless service revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow. As I always say, continuous improvement never ends. We will keep pushing forward to deliver value for our customers and our shareholders. Finally, our industry sits at the center of the next wave of innovation as AI transforms how consumers and businesses operate.
Our network assets and capabilities position us uniquely in this evolving landscape. I look forward to sharing more about how Verizon will connect the AI ecosystem on our 8:30 A.M. call this morning.