Verizon

Verizon delivered 306,000 broadband net additions in Q3 2025, with 261,000 coming from fixed wireless access (FWA) and 61,000 from Fios fiber—the best quarterly fiber result in two years. The company now serves 13.2 million total broadband connections, up 11.1% year-over-year, while competitors hemorrhage cable customers. The biological strategy: habitat diversification. Verizon doesn't depend on a single infrastructure type. FWA uses existing 5G cell towers to beam internet to homes, requiring no new wire installations. Fios delivers gigabit speeds through fiber-optic cables that took decades to deploy. Both technologies access different customer segments: FWA serves areas where fiber is uneconomical, Fios dominates density where performance matters. This is ecological niche partitioning, where related species coexist by exploiting different resources in the same environment.

The FWA subscriber base reached 5.4 million in Q3 2025, with Verizon targeting 8-9 million by 2028. Each FWA customer generates lower ARPU than Fios, but installation costs virtually nothing compared to trenching fiber to individual homes. The economics mirror r-selection versus K-selection reproductive strategies. FWA is r-selection: many offspring, minimal investment per offspring, rapid colonization of available territory. Fios is K-selection: fewer offspring, intensive investment per offspring, dominance in specific high-value niches. Verizon runs both strategies simultaneously, extracting value from whichever approach fits each geographic market's characteristics. Wireless service revenue hit $21.0B in Q3 2025, up 2.1% year-over-year, demonstrating that the core organism remains metabolically healthy while expanding into adjacent niches.

The Frontier acquisition closing in 2025 will add fiber passings to reach 30+ million combined by 2028, with Verizon targeting 1 million+ new passings annually post-merger. This is infrastructure as extended phenotype: organisms that build structures (beaver dams, termite mounds, spider webs) to improve survival odds. Verizon's fiber and 5G networks are extended phenotypes that create competitive moats. The company generated $134.8B in 2024 revenue while maintaining the capital discipline that separates sustainable infrastructure builders from debt-fueled collapses. Every fiber route, every cell tower, every network interconnection increases the cost for customers to switch while decreasing Verizon's cost to serve each additional customer. The network effects compound over time rather than eroding.