Verizon this morning kicked off a new round of carrier financial reports with its fourth quarter 2012 earnings results. Total Q4 wireless revenues for Verizon hit $20 billion, up nearly 10 percent over the previous year, while total revenues for all of 2012 finished at 75.9 billion, which is a growth of over 8 percent from 2011. Verizon added a total of 2.2 million retail connections for the quarter, including 2.1 million retail postpaid connections, which is a record for the carrier. Verizon's number of postpaid connections for all of 2012 finished at 5 million, and Big Red ended the last year with a total of 98.2 million subs.
On the device side of things, Verizon says that it sold 7.3-million 4G LTE products in the fourth quarter of 2012. Around 23 percent of the devices on Big Red's network are now LTE-capable, and Verizon recently noted that nearly half of all of its data traffic goes over its LTE network. Overall smartphone sales for Q4 2012 hit 9.8 million, and of that number, 6.8 million were iPhones. Verizon says that nearly half of its iPhone sales were LTE-enabled products (aka the iPhone 5). Most of the remaining 3 million smartphones sold by Verizon were Android-powered.
Overall it sounds like Verizon had a pretty good end to 2012, especially when it comes to 4G LTE. Not only did the carrier activate quite a few LTE-enabled products, but it also reached its goal of activating 400 LTE markets before 2012 wrapped up. Verizon's LTE network is now live in 476 markets and covers over 273 million people, which the big red operator says is almost 89 percent of the U.S. population. Verizon expects its LTE service to be available in nearly every area that its 3G service is by the middle of 2013, while the LTE network footprint is expected to match the 3G network by the end of this year. How many of you are using a device on Verizon's 4G LTE network?
