Verizon wants you to bundle up this summer. The company is cutting its base home internet rate plans to $25/month, but only for customers on higher-dollar Verizon mobile plans.
The occasion is Verizon unifying its three forms of home internet service—Fios wired fiber, 5G wireless, and 4G wireless—as one product, Verizon Home Internet. The three modes all have different coverage and performance, but they're being combined from a marketing perspective.
"Our ambition is to become a national broadband provider, and if you add up our fixed access footprint and our Fios footprint, we are already covering 47 million households in the US," says Verizon Chief Revenue Officer Frank Boulben.
The goal is to offer a single entry point where Verizon will tell you the fastest form of internet you qualify for, rather than the company's currently divided Fios and 5G Home services.
3 Levels of Internet
Fios is the flagship—it's fiber, and you can get a reliable, symmetrical gig to your home, although the $25 price is for 300Mbps up and down. I have Fios at home and can safely say it is superior in terms of quality and reliability to Spectrum cable.
Verizon's 5G home internet comes in two varieties. If you're near one of its short-range millimeter-wave panels, you can get speeds up to a gig or more. (The really fast stuff will cost you $35 rather than $25, Boulben notes.) Most people, though, would get 100Mbps or so for their $25 using mid-band. Then there's 4G LTE home internet, which Verizon offers in some rural areas. That's not expanding, but it's out there.
The news here is mostly around Verizon's aggressive expansion of its 5G home internet service, thanks to its new mid-band C-band 5G network. With C-band covering about 100 million people in 46 areas of the country, Verizon is able to go up against cable and DSL providers in places where it previously didn't have Fios buildouts or enough 4G capacity.
The catch, of course, is that you need to sign up with one of Verizon's premium Do More, Get More or Play More mobile plans.
This is all part of a currently common move in the mobile industry to get people to move up to the most expensive unlimited plans, by bundling in other freebies and discounts along the way. If you're smart and do the math, you may still be able to save money (but remember, do the math). The carriers, meanwhile, get to report higher average revenue per wireless user (ARPU) to Wall Street.
For his part, Boulben says he wants to get to 4-5 million wireless home internet subscribers by 2025. "By 2025, we've committed to having close to 70 million households covered between fixed wireless access and Fios."