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Verizon is casting a wider net for wireless home broadband customers with a new Home Internet Lite option that’s only available outside the coverage area of its existing 5G home service.
This new Lite offering comes with slower speeds—from 10 to 25Mbps versus the 100Mbps maximum it advertises on its cheapest 5G Home Internet plan—that drop to a limit of 10Mbps after a 150GB data cap. As with Verizon’s existing service, this comes with a free home receiver that incorporates a Wi-Fi router.
Verizon’s press release suggests Lite will be cheaper, touting rates “as low as $25/month for a limited time.” But a disclaimer page shows that the price is only available as a “Loyalty Discount” for subscribers who already have Verizon postpaid mobile service; this deal lasts 36 months.
Afterwards, Lite runs $35 a month, while customers without Verizon phone service pay $50 a month. All of these rates require enabling autopay and paperless billing. Verizon’s entry-level Home 5G plan has the same prices under the same conditions.
However, Verizon isn’t selling Lite in areas where it already offers fixed-wireless connectivity, which it launched as an LTE service in 2020. Instead, spokesman Steven Blumenthal said in an email, it’s available in areas outside that footprint that Verizon’s fast C-band 5G still reaches.
At an address in Washington, DC, Verizon’s site listed those older, unlimited-data plans, with rates that topped out at a $75 Home Ultimate plan providing download speeds of up to 300Mbps. At an address in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, some 75 miles west, Verizon only quoted a $50 standalone rate for Lite.
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The FCC-mandated broadband-facts label for that second location listed typical download speeds ranging from 10 to 25Mbps for the first 150GB of data, then 3 to 10Mbps. It cited uploads running from 2 to 6Mbps under the data cap, then 1 to 3Mbps.
In rural markets like that spot in Virginia’s countryside, Verizon’s competition isn’t likely to be cable or fiber broadband but satellite broadband—in particular, SpaceX’s Starlink. Verizon’s announcement underscores that with a jab at unspecified “satellite providers” that says its $25 loyalty-discounted rate provides “an average savings of more than $40 per month for years.”
That reads to us as a reference to the $59 discounted rate that Starlink started offering last month. SpaceX doesn’t provide that cheaper price everywhere, though; at the Shenandoah address, its site only quoted the standard $120 plan.
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Verizon is following in T-Mobile’s footsteps with this Lite venture. That rival carrier introduced its own Lite offshoot of T-Mobile Home Internet in 2022, with a much stricter data cap: a near-useless 128kbps speed limit above its 100 and 150GB allotments, $60 and $85 with autopay enabled.
AT&T, which only got into the fixed-wireless business in 2023, years after T-Mobile and Verizon, has yet to introduce a light version of its AT&T Internet Air service.
Fixed wireless service has become the fastest-growing part of the broadband business and one of the most popular, allowing millions of Americans to dump cable services that were previously their only viable option for fast connectivity at home. T-Mobile and Verizon’s home-5G services occupy the ninth and 10th spots on PCMag’s Readers’ Choice awards for ISPs, with ratings comfortably above those for Comcast’s Xfinity, Charter’s Spectrum, and other large cable operators.
Coming after two other steps by Verizon to expand its fixed-wireless business—selling prepaid home 5G through its Tracfone subsidiary and buying the pioneering fixed-wireless provider Starry—Thursday’s move suggests that boosting that customer base is high on the to-do list for new Verizon CEO Dan Schulman.
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