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No, it wasn’t a record-breaking quarter for Verizon. No, they did not gain on their chief rival, AT&T. No, they’re not crossing the 70-million subscriber threshold anytime in the near future. But Verizon did have themselves a solid fourth quarter, adding two million customers amid the holiday blitz. This is a tick higher than the 1.85 million net additions predicted by analysts. Of course, good times might not be extending that far into the future.

As was discussed on Prepaid Reviews this morning — before Verizon’s earnings reports circulated around the Internets — they’ve benefited from adding far more postpaid customers than AT&T. For instance, over half of AT&T’s 2.7 million fourth quarter additions were on the prepaid end. While I wasn’t able to immediately find Verizon’s prepaid additions, on the whole they have about 90 percent postpaid on their network.

So is Verizon’s postpaid model going to carry them through rough economic times ahead? Intuitively, it makes sense that prepaid would see a spike in any kind of recession environment. But Verizon does have a solid core of postpaid users, and might benefit greatly if they can hold onto those customers, while their rival sees a shift towards prepaid.

[Reuters]

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