The week after Barcelona was about turning announcements into shelf space. AT&T rebuilt its consumer rate card around three new Unlimited Your Way plans, adding an entry-level Value 2.0 tier and letting customers mix and match plans across lines, a direct response to complexity fatigue and a shot at T-Mobile's more rigid lineup. The iPhone 17e hit stores on March 11 and the carriers immediately discounted it to nearly free, confirming that the value segment is where the subscriber fight is happening. In the machine-to-machine world, Verifone announced it will use Thales eSIM technology and the GSMA's SGP.32 standard to manage connectivity across its global payment terminal fleet, one of the first large commercial commitments to the new remote provisioning standard.
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.