US Tier 1 Carrier Report Highlights: Wireless Customers Still Hanging on to Devices

All three Tier 1 US carriers have now submitted their Q4 2024 reports, so let’s take a look at some of the key highlights from Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T.

2025 Business Priorities

Each of the three Tier 1 carriers stated their 2025 business priorities in their respective reports, as follows:

AT&T

1. Grow durable 5G and Fiber relationships
2. Effective and efficient in everything we do
3. Deliberate capital allocation

T-Mobile

- Achieve industry-leading customer growth fueled by combination of:

• Best network
• Best value
• Best experience

- Translate industry-leading customer growth into industry-leading financial performance

- Extend overall network lead with:

• Best assets
• Customer centricity
• Technology leadership

Verizon

1. Grow wireless service revenue, expand adjusted EBITDA and general strong free cash flow
2. Accelerate mobility momentum and broadband growth, and scale private networks
3. Focus on operational excellence, customer experience, and financial discipline
4. Execute on our capital allocation model
5. Leverage AI to drive efficiencies and unlock new revenue through our fiber and edge compute assets

Q4 2024 Subscriber Metric Key Takeaways 

• Postpaid phone churn remained stable year-over-year for AT&T and Verizon and decreased slightly for T-Mobile.

• Q4 usually sees the highest churn due to seasonal factors, whereas Q2 tends to experience the lowest churn.
• The seasonal rise in Q4 churn each year aligns with higher promotional spending aimed at customer acquisition and increasing device sales, driving stronger upgrade activity for the quarter.
• However, in Q4 2024, higher promo spending also led to slight quarter-over-quarter declines in postpaid phone-only average revenue per user for carriers that report it.
• Despite the rise in quarter-over-quarter upgrades (which is typical for Q4), upgrade rates as a yearly average remain down, indicating that customers continue to hold onto their devices longer (likely due to economic pressures).

• Verizon saw positive prepaid net adds YoY for the first time since the TracFone acquisition.
• T-Mobile was 2024​’s industry leader in postpaid net account adds and net line adds.

What Does All This Mean?

The carriers’ subscriber results and business priorities tell us they are focused on:

Increasing revenue and reducing costs 

• Seasonal inventory optimization 

• Since Q2 consistently has the lowest churn and Q4 the highest, carriers need robust inventory forecasting and optimized POS operations to handle seasonal fluctuations, i.e. adjusting stock levels, managing promotions, and streamlining transactions.

Maximizing promotional ROI, and adjusting to increased competition 

• Q4 typically boosts sales but hurts margins. Real-time analytics can help retailers adjust pricing and promotions for profitability

• While Q4 promos drive higher upgrade rates, the average upgrade rate is still down YoY, indicating we are still seeing longer device lifecycles. Tracking upgrade cycles, optimizing promotions, and managing trade-in programs to counteract declining upgrade frequencies remains a priority. Real-time analytics can also plug-in here to help retailers increase attachment rates, average basket sizes, and the number of services and devices per account.

Enhancing customer experience to increase customer retention 

• Faster activations and an easy-to-use, easy-to-train-on POS are essential for improving employee and customer experiences.

• Innovation (especially as it pertains to AI) remains an area of interest, and technology solutions that harness AI will be increasingly leveraged. 

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