Verizon CEO Dan Schulman revealed in the company’s Q2 earnings call it had struck a deal worth more than $1 billion with Google for data centre connectivity, while teasing other agreements will be announced before the end of the year.

Schulman said it will provide dark fibre connectivity for Google’s data centres, before adding it expects to announce other deals which together will be worth “multiple billions of dollars in revenue over the next several years”.

Details about the Google partnership were not disclosed in its second quarter earnings statement.

Over the period, Schulman stated its results provide “clear, compelling evidence” a recent shake-up to its consumer plans “is driving a structural inflection point across our entire business”.

“We are accelerating across our key metrics, achieving a step-change in churn reduction while lowering our customer acquisition and retention costs,” he said, while adding its core connectivity business is gaining momentum and the emergence of AI infrastructure revenue was helping reshape its growth trajectory.

Simplified service plans and a new loyalty rewards programme helped the company draw 184,000 postpaid phone net additions during the quarter, representing the highest gains in the segment in the past five years. Mobile and broadband net additions tallied up to 550,000, up 230,000 year-on-year.

Total revenue was broadly flat at $34.4 billion. Mobility and broadband service revenue hit $23.4 billion, a 2.8% increase, but this was offset by a nearly 20% decline in equipment revenue due to lower upgrade volumes.

Net income dropped 22.9% to $3.9 billion, primarily driven by a $1.8 billion hit in pre-tax special items including a $746 million loss related to its international wireline and managed network services business.

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Airtel Africa CEO Sunil Taldar announced London as the preferred location for listing shares in its mobile money division, with the IPO expected to take place later this year.

In a trading update, the chief said he believed the UK capital city would provide access to a broad international investor base and “support our ambition to unlock the long-term value of one of Africa’s leading fintech platforms”.

Talking-up the impact of the service on its markets, he noted it continues to expand financial inclusion with “strong engagement”, highlighting Airtel Africa’s growing product range and an increase in digital adoption throughout the region.

In its fiscal Q1 2027 (the quarter to end-June), it had a mobile money customer base of 56.5 million, up 23% year-on-year, and processed a total of $61.4 billion, almost 52% higher.

ARPU from the service stood at $2.40, up 14%.

Although the executive did not expand on the current status of the plan beyond the timeline and location, Bloomberg reported earlier this year the operator could net between $1.5 billion and $2 billion from the share sale.

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T-Mobile US CEO Srini Gopalan (pictured) insisted its second quarter earnings are proof its strategy is working, highlighting the success of customer-focussed initiatives which are leading to a surge in adoption of its premium packages.

Gopalan stated the company’s strategy is simple: “give customers the best network, the best value and the best experience, all in one place.”

“That’s how we eliminate trade-offs for our customers, and that’s what sets us apart, and our results represent another proof point that our strategy is working,” he added.

Since taking on the role in November 2025, Gopalan has changed the reporting structure in results announcements to no longer reveal changes in wireless customer additions.

However, it recorded net account additions of 277,000 in Q2, a 13% decrease year-on-year but up quarterly by 60,000.

Speaking to Reuters, COO Jon Freier stated a push towards more lucrative subscriber plans, which include customer loyalty incentives, unlimited data and device upgrades, is beginning to pay-off.

“We are seeing new customers really kind of adopt our most premium plans at a rate of about 60% of total sales,” he said.

Total sales for the quarter increased 8% to $22.8 billion, with total service revenue up the same amount to just shy of $19 billion. Net income was broadly flat at $3.2 billion, due to the impact of related costs on its UScellular merger.  

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Fibre proved fruitful for BT Group in the opening quarter of its fiscal 2027 (the period to end-June), becoming the key generator of broadband revenue as the operator booked record levels of connections and uptake.

BT added 514,000 FTTP connections in the three-month period alone, leaving it with a total of 23.4 million. The operator declared it is experiencing record demand for fibre services at its Openreach and consumer businesses.

In wireless, BT asserted EE “maintained its mobile leadership”, pointing to the receipt of a consumer award with category-topping figures in reliability, coverage and performance.

Its 5G network coverage hit 77% of the population.

CEO Allison Kirkby (pictured) declared it a “solid start” to the fiscal year, with gains in consumer customers increasingly backed by BT’s selection for “mission-critical” connections.

She said the consumer business is benefiting from ongoing investment in BT’s brands and services. It is also “stabilising” service revenue in its Business division on “sales order growth from major customers”.

Kirkby was of course positive about a recently-forged JV with Verizon and said BT is unparalleled in the “scale and pace” of work to upgrade the “digital backbone” of the UK.

BT’s numbers leave it “on track to deliver our targets, including cashflow of circa £2 billion”, the CEO explained.

The rising cost of finance impacted pre-tax profit, with the figure for continuing operations dropping from £526 million in fiscal Q1 2026 to £505 million. Revenue was flat at £4.3 billion.

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Telus lured a former executive back to the company from the world of private equity, as it lined up the team it hopes will drive a transformation of its core telecom business.

David Fuller is set to become EVP and group president of Telus Communications on 1 September in an executive shuffle to advance a rejig of the Canadian operator’s business by focusing capital on high margin products, services and customer segments.

Telus president and CEO Victor Dodig (pictured, right) said he has “no doubt” Fuller would “engage and focus our team”, branding the executive “one of the most talented and experienced telecom executives in Canada”.

Fuller ended a 15-year tenure at Telus in 2019 and is returning from a role with Silverlight Capital Partners. He is not long out of the Canadian telecoms sector, though, having been president of Rogers Wireless between 2021 and 2022.

Current Telus Business Solutions president Navin Arora is to become EVP and group president of its Global Platform business, which covers health, agriculture, consumer goods and digital services.

Arora is also to head up enterprise corporate strategy, along with Telus Global Ventures, corporate development and data centre planning.

Dodig described Arora as being given a “critical” position involving “driving value” from the various business units involved.

Current Telus Consumer Solutions EVP Zainul Mawji is to leave, ending a spell of more than 20-years with the company. Dodig said she played key roles in a fibre expansion project and providing products spanning its “residential, security, automation and health lines of business”.

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AT&T reported a 2.3% year-over-year revenue increase to $31.6 billion in Q2, driven by net adds across fibre, fixed wireless access (FWA) and post-paid phone subscribers.

While slightly below analysts’ estimates, the small increase was driven largely by growth in Advanced Connectivity fibre and wireless revenues, including the impact of AT&T’s first-quarter acquisition of Lumen’s mass markets fibre business.

The operator added more than 1 million Advanced Connectivity customers during the quarter. Advanced Connectivity service revenue grew 5.1% year-over-year to $23.5 billion.

AT&T rolls its fibre broadband, FWA, post-paid phone and business fibre services into its Advanced Connectivity category.

It recorded 646,000 total consumer and business internet net adds, comprised of 367,000 fibre and 279,000 FWA connections, marking a record quarter for combined fibre and fixed wireless additions.

Post-paid phone net adds totalled 432,000 to top analysts’ projections of 338,500, according to FactSet.

AT&T chair and CEO John Stankey (pictured) noted on the earnings call those additions mark the strongest consumer post-paid wireless account growth in more than three years. Post-paid churn of 0.86% was down slightly from 0.87% a year ago.

Stankey has long been a proponent of a converged strategy of wireless and fibre services as a key differentiator for the company.

“At the end of the second quarter, 42.5% of our advanced home Internet customers also have a post-paid wireless account with AT&T,” he said on the earnings call. “This convergence rate reached 45% when excluding customers within our acquired footprint from Lumen.

“These are high lifetime value subscribers, and our strong customer growth is a key driver of our accelerated financial growth during the second quarter,” he added.

The operator added more than 1 million total consumer and business fibre locations, bringing its total to 38.6 million. Stankey said it remains on track to exceed 40 million fibre locations by the end of 2026 and more than 60 million by 2030.

Income from continuing operations rose 3.6% to $5.0 billion, while adjusted EBITDA climbed 5.2% to $12.3 billion.

Stankey stated the results demonstrate the company’s structural advantages heading into the next era of connectivity, and confirmed AT&T is accelerating planned share repurchases to approximately $10 billion this year.

SpaceX
The AT&T chief was asked about forging a wholesale agreement with Elon Musk-owned SpaceX but he stated AT&T does not see a need for satellite service as a core part of its distribution strategy because it already handles more than 98% of traffic across its converged customer network.

“I don’t feel a need right now that I need to have a satellite partner as a main distribution vehicle for me because I don’t think it addresses a part of the market that I can’t get to on my own,” he said.

Stankey pointed to the joint venture AT&T formed with Verizon and T-Mobile US, stating it allows the operators to work with multiple satellite operators, including SpaceX, Amazon, and AST SpaceMobile, for the small percentage of coverage which falls outside their terrestrial networks.

“By the time we get into next year, we will have solved for that other 2% and we will be in the market doing what customers want, which is providing them the assurance that they can buy from one provider and always be on the internet,” he said.

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KDDI predicted a greater role for drones in disaster response after completing tests operating a craft connected through satellite rather than its terrestrial mobile network.

It noted tests conducted in May using SpaceX’s Starlink satellites advance the potential role for drones in disaster recovery by removing gaps in the reach of mobile networks from the operational equation.

KDDI stated the satellites were confirmed as a viable means of connecting remotely operated drones, boosting potential use cases for public and private sector organisations.

It expects search and rescue, environmental monitoring and infrastructure inspection to be among the use cases the expanded drone operations could deliver.

The operator worked with specialist division KDDI Smart Drone on the trial and stated the pair are committed to developing a set-up enabling access to remotely-controlled craft anywhere in Japan in under ten-minutes.

KDDI plans to further develop its remote drone operation capabilities by authenticating the best combination of network connectivity and refining the handoff between mobile and satellite networks.

It aims to create a reliable beyond-visual-line-of-site remote drone operation system which could be tailored to specific use cases and geographies.

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