The wireless industry retired its customer metrics at the end of 2025, and this is the second quarter under the new schedule. T-Mobile publishes accounts and nothing below them, AT&T moved postpaid phone inside a segment built around convergence, Verizon took the Consumer and Business phone split off its tables, and Comcast and Charter publish mobile lines. No two of those units are comparable without rebuilding them from the financials up, and two quarters in, this is the regime rather than a transition anyone will reverse.
We are grateful for these changes. When the carriers take the numbers away and go dark, most of the market goes blind, and our capabilities and experience shine even more brightly. A retired metric does not stop existing; it stops being handed to you, and being handed the answer was never the job here. I have spent 25 years building the instruments this industry lacked, from customer lifetime value to the handset replacement cycle to effective price per minute, message, and megabyte, and rebuilding one a carrier takes back uses the same muscle. That is the whole of the second quarter: five operators obscuring the composition of their growth behind four different units, and in a convergence market composition is the entire contest.
Begin with T-Mobile’s chosen unit, because it teaches the most. An account deactivates only when its last line leaves, so a household that drops a tablet, a watch, and a second phone still counts as fully retained. T-Mobile reported 0.99% postpaid account churn, a floor under line loss and never a ceiling, and the floor sinks as the strategy succeeds: lines per account run near 3.44 on our estimate, T-Mobile having retired the customer count that would let anyone check it. Its own definition shows why the unit cannot bear the weight, since an account blends phones, 5G gateways, fiber, tablets, hotspots and wearables into one item. Acquisition diluted it further, roughly 2.2 million accounts bought across Lumos, Metronet and UScellular, many broadband-only and carrying about one line, and T-Mobile attributes the 7 basis point rise in account churn to exactly that.
Verizon hides the opposite half, and it has a reason to. It reported 184,000 consolidated postpaid phone net additions and its best Consumer second-quarter phone result in five years. A Consumer and Business split puts two numbers in front of the market every quarter and a miss in either gets punished on its own, while the aggregate lets growth in the stronger segment cover a decline in the weaker and still read as a win. That is why the split left the tables.
Underneath it the household base is shrinking. Across the four quarters to June 2026 Verizon added 891,000 retail postpaid phone lines while its retail postpaid account base fell 409,000, from 34.6 million to 34.2 million, including 132,000 in the second quarter alone. Accounts have fallen in five of the six quarters since March 2025. The lines went up and the households went down.
Revenue per household went down too, and Verizon explained that one in advance. ARPA fell from $170.79 to $168.35. Dan Schulman said on May 21, 2026 that promotional amortization was running almost 190 basis points of headwind and would turn as soon as the third quarter, and that the decision not to raise prices again would lap by then. A disclosed 1.9-point headwind is larger than the 1.4% ARPA decline, so that line sits inside an accounting cycle rather than proving an exodus, and Comcast reported convergence ARPA down 1.5% in the same quarter on broadband pricing pressure. What sits outside the cycle is the line itself: revenue per postpaid connection fell about 3% while lines per account rose from 3.63 to 3.70, so each added line earns less than the line already there.
Both halves of the Verizon engine improved. Gross additions rose 2.8% and churn fell to 0.92%, and the 193,000 year-over-year gain splits roughly 141,000 from lower churn against 75,000 from more gross additions, less about 23,000 absorbed by the larger base. Schulman said in May that at least half would come from churn and possibly more; it arrived near three quarters. Retention did the heavier lifting, succeeding at the line while failing at the account.
Verizon’s profit number is the most impressive thing in the quarter, and it is a cost story. Total operating revenue fell 0.7% to $34.3 billion and adjusted EBITDA still grew 7.2% to $13.7 billion, lifting margin from 37.1% to 40.1%, both records. Adding roughly $920 million of EBITDA on revenue that shrank about $240 million means close to $1.2 billion of cost came out of the quarter. Free cash flow grew 24.4%, adjusted EPS rose 6.6% to $1.30, guidance went up a second consecutive quarter, and the buyback target rose to as much as $4.5 billion. Two things temper it. Reported EPS fell 22.0% to $0.92 on roughly $655 million of rationalization and severance charges. And part of the margin is arithmetic rather than discipline: equipment revenue fell nearly 20%, over $1.2 billion, as the upgrade rate went from 3.6% to 2.6%, and selling fewer subsidized handsets flatters margin on its own. A fall iPhone launch could reverse that half.
AT&T added 432,000 postpaid phone lines, its best wireless quarter in years, and FirstNet accounts for roughly 66,000, putting consumer phone near 366,000. Nearly all of it came from inside the fiber footprint, and AT&T’s own disclosure shows it. Converged customers on fiber, households buying both AT&T fiber and an AT&T consumer phone line, grew 178,000 in the quarter. An average US household holds 2.4 people aged six or older, so at two lines each those households brought about 356,000 phone lines against 366,000 consumer additions. Two rather than 2.4 leaves room for the households that already had AT&T mobile before the fiber sale.
the house on the account. A family that has already chosen AT&T for both products is the likeliest family to put everyone on one plan. Above that line, growth outside the fiber map is negative. Using the broader convergence figure would overstate the case: converged customers across all advanced home internet grew 302,000, but 124,000 came on Internet Air, the fixed wireless product, which sells to households that typically already have AT&T phones and brings broadband revenue rather than phone lines. Fiber pulls mobile, and mobile pulls fixed wireless. Inside 38.6 million fiber locations the phone business and the fiber build are one machine, and outside them AT&T is waiting for the truck. It publishes phone churn three ways and splits none by converged status. Converged households churn less than single-product households, so both the fiber build and the FWA sale are buying retention as well as growth, and what stays off the page is not whether convergence works but how much it is worth.
Cable is one strategy at two operators, and this quarter does not separate them. Comcast added 448,000 domestic wireless lines, its best on record, reaching 10.2 million, and Charter added 406,000 to reach 12.5 million. On the broadband side they lost 167,000 and 172,000, within 5,000 of each other and both worse than the prior quarter. Which one looks better on broadband flips with the comparison base, Comcast ahead through 2024, Charter through most of 2025, Comcast again in 2026, so a single quarter’s year-over-year gap says more about the year-ago quarter than about this one. What is durable is the plan both chief executives are executing. Converged households churn less than single-product households, so selling wireless into the internet base insulates it, and Charter pushed hardest in the quarter, guaranteeing $1,000 of first-year savings to households moving two or more lines from Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile. Comcast’s convergence ARPA runs near $85 against $168.35 per postpaid account at Verizon and $152.91 at T-Mobile, funded by offloading about 90% of mobile traffic onto its own Wi-Fi across 65 million converged passings. No carrier reaches that by cutting price. The cost is churn neither discloses, which we put near 2% monthly against the sub-1% the carriers report.
Each carrier executed its chief executive’s plan almost flawlessly, and that is the risk. AT&T’s growth is real and it stops at the edge of the fiber map. Verizon’s retention engine and its cost discipline are real, and the household base both work on keeps shrinking. T-Mobile’s margin is real and the metric that would price it is no longer published. The danger is not that the plans fail. It is that they succeed exactly as designed, and each has retired the one number that would show what success costs.
Source: carrier filings and calls pulled July 26, 2026 for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. Verizon 2Q 2026 Financial and Operating Information and earnings release, plus investor conference remarks of May 21, 2026; T-Mobile Q2 2026 Investor Factbook and supplementary data; AT&T 2Q 2026 earnings release and trending schedule; Comcast 2Q 2026 earnings release and earnings call of July 23, 2026; Charter 2Q 2026 results release and trending schedule.