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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T-Mobile US won the most categories in Opensignal’s latest network experience report, which also examined the performance of AT&T and Verizon over a 90-day period during a window which included the FIFA World Cup.

Opensignal stated the Q2 research covered tested operators’ ability to manage network congestion both at stadiums and across host cities.

Verizon, as the World Cup’s official telecommunications sponsor, deployed private 5G and fixed wireless access to support broadcast and retail operations at venues, alongside investment in surrounding communities.

AT&T launched a premium Turbo Live service in January to ease congestion at live events and introduced a World Cup eSIM for visiting fans, while T-Mobile rolled out new Dynamic CX capabilities on its AI-powered self-organising network and promoted its T-Priority service for first responders.

Opensignal pointed to a Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction in June, a re-auction of mid-band licences previously held by Dish Network, as a key factor shaping future capacity.

On network performance, T-Mobile won best download speed outright at 192.5Mb/s, nearly 97Mb/s ahead of second-placed AT&T at 96Mb/s and Verizon third at 89.4Mb/s.

T-Mobile also led the 5G download speed category at 247.4Mb/s, ahead of AT&T’s 223.5Mb/s and Verizon’s 179.2Mb/s, and swept both upload speed (16 Mb/s) and 5G upload speed (19.2 Mb/s) awards.

In reliability and consistency, T-Mobile won reliability experience with 942 points, narrowly ahead of AT&T’s 939 and Verizon’s 932, and led consistent quality at 82.8%, ahead of Verizon’s 80.4% and AT&T’s 79.4%.

Coverage
Verizon won the coverage experience award outright with 9.7 points out of 10, narrowly ahead of AT&T, while T-Mobile was ranked third, but won 5G coverage with 8.5 points.

AT&T topped time on network at 99.6%, though T-Mobile led 5G Availability at 91.8%, with Verizon closing the gap significantly, up seven percentage points from the prior report.

For video and gaming, T-Mobile won video experience and live video experience, while Verizon took top honours across 5G video experience and 5G live video Experience. T-Mobile also swept both games experience and 5G games experience awards.

All told, T-Mobile won 12 out of the 16 categories.

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