Earnings week told one story from three directions: the connection to the home and the connection in the pocket are now a single business. AT&T opened on January 28 with fourth quarter results built on converged fiber and 5G customers, posting $33.5 billion in revenue and its best year of consumer broadband growth in a decade. Verizon answered on January 30 with more than one million total mobility and broadband net additions, its best quarter since 2019, in its first report since closing the Frontier deal. Between them, Juniper Research published a January 27 study forecasting eSIM connections will grow 30 percent in 2026 to 1.5 billion, with the GSMA's SGP.32 standard unlocking the IoT wave. The scoreboard for US telecom has officially changed, and everyone is now reporting to it.
This week the MVNO economy got a growth forecast and the biggest fiber deal in America got a closing date. Juniper Research published a study on January 12 projecting global MVNO subscribers will climb from 333 million in 2026 to 438 million by 2030, crediting MVNO-in-a-Box platforms for letting enterprises launch mobile services without building telecom stacks. The same day, Keysight and Samsung demonstrated a standards-based 5G non-terrestrial network link in the new n252 band, a milestone for making direct-to-cell a native part of the 5G standard rather than a proprietary bolt-on. And on January 15, Verizon and Frontier announced they had cleared the final regulatory hurdle, setting January 20 as the closing date for the roughly $20 billion acquisition.
Thanksgiving week slowed the news cycle but not the paperwork or the price wars. On November 24, Juniper Research forecast that global eSIM connections will grow 300 percent over the next five years, with China's newly opened market described as an immediate opportunity. On November 25, the FCC's bureaus accepted for filing the applications underpinning EchoStar's twin spectrum sales, moving both the SpaceX and AT&T transactions into their formal comment cycles on a coordinated schedule. And through Black Friday week the value segment put on its loudest show of the year, led by Mint Mobile cutting its unlimited plans to 15 dollars a month, half its standard rate.
A week about the plumbing of the industry rather than its headlines. Juniper Research published new figures showing travel eSIM revenue reaching 1.8 billion dollars in 2025, up 85 percent in a single year, confirming how quickly downloadable SIMs are eating international roaming. On October 14 Ericsson reported third quarter results, with sales down but margins holding as the vendor leaned on major contracts in India, Japan, and the UK. And on October 15 Samsung announced a multi-country deal to deploy virtualized, O-RAN compliant network equipment for Vodafone across Europe, starting in Germany and covering thousands of sites over five years.