Verizon enjoys a rush of new tablet users as smartphone plans stagnate

   

Verizon's money machine continues to plow on, but much of its wireless growth this quarter came from tablets, not smartphones -- a trend that started last quarter. Big Red added some 1.4 million net retail connections, of whom a whopping 1.15 million used LTE-equipped slates. Most of those additions were likely Verizon customers already, who had taken advantage of the More Everything plan to add a tablet to their existing phone plan for $10. Though those folks technically count as new connections, Verizon only added 304,000 net phone customers, compared to 940,000 this time a year ago. That means that despite selling a million or so smartphone connections, the company dumped about 700,000 -- a considerable slowdown compared to T-Mobile. Still, Verizon saw 7.5 percent more wireless revenue ($21.5 billion) and a similar bump in operating profits.

On the broadband side, Verizon added 139,000 connections to its high-speed FiOS internet plans, with 100,000 new FiOS video connections. That makes 6.3 million FiOS internet customers total, figures that won't be hurt by the addition of faster upload speeds. Of course, what a lot of customers want (especially Netflix users) is faster download speeds -- Verizon said that it switched 70,000 customers from copper to fiber over the last quarter, which definitely won't hurt.