A rare three-carrier alignment defined the quarter. On May 14, 2026, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon announced a joint venture to pool spectrum and support satellite operators with a long-horizon structure that pushes meaningful impact into 2027, once T-Mobile’s Starlink exclusivity potentially expires. All three positioned satellite as complementary, not competitive to cell towers. Elon Musk’s Starlink Mobile continues to dominate the narrative, leaving many property owners to question the future role of cell towers. T-Mobile highlighted steady progress on its UScellular integration, sharpening its rural strategy in markets where it currently reaches just 24% of households, and posted a record NPS (Net promoted score) of 46 which was the highest ever among national carriers. Verizon, meanwhile, maintained its disciplined approach to spending under CEO Dan Schulman. AT&T delivered the quarter’s biggest spectrum move: its $23B EchoStar acquisition cleared the FCC on May 12 and closed in Q3, adding 50 MHz of nationwide mid- and low-band spectrum across nearly every U.S. market. AT&T also announced a CFO transition, with Pascal Desroches retiring December 31 and Jennifer Biry stepping in January 1, 2027.
Verizon
- 184,000 postpaid phone net additions
- Forecast of postpaid phone net adds in upper half of 750K–1M range, reaffirmed
- 348,000 broadband net additions, a year-over-year increase of 12.3%
- 193,000 fixed wireless
- 155,000 fiber
- Goal of 32M fiber passings by end of 2026
- $21.5B+ adjusted free cash flow in 2026, increased to 9% to 10%, year over year
- $16.0B–$16.5B CAPEX in 2026 reaffirmed
Quotable: re: Satellite not being a threat to cell towers and terrestrial wireless
“If they try and compete against FWA at 300 meg, that ceiling drops to 5-20 homes per square mile, versus what we can do is anywhere between 500 and 2,000. We’re like 100x-1,000x more efficient. Our speeds and our capabilities are much higher. It’s basically not possible because of physics, not because of execution, but because of physics, for satellite to effectively compete against a terrestrial network in either mobility or broadband in urban and suburban geographies, which, by the way, is where like 95%-98% of our revenues are. Satellite does have a TAM, for sure. It’s probably somewhere between six and eight million homes in the U.S., but it’s in primarily very rural geographies where building out a terrestrial network just is cost prohibitive. It doesn’t pencil out.”
Dan Schulman | CEO, Verizon
Quotable: re: Dispelling a Starlink MVNO option
“…although you didn’t ask this question, but I’ve read it in speculation out there, that there is no backdoor to our MVNOs in any structure. We think that satellite is very complementary to our service. We want to work with the satellite providers, primarily through the JV with T-Mobile and AT&T. There is no reason that we can see to extend an MVNO to any satellite player, and there’s no way that anyone can get access to our MVNOs as well.”
Dan Schulman | CEO, Verizon
AT&T
- 432,000 postpaid phone net additions (31,000 more than Q2/2025)
- 646,000 broadband net additions
- 279,000 fixed wireless (was 292,000)
- 367,000 fiber (was 292,000; your list had the even Q1 split)
- Goal of 40M+ fiber passings by end of 2026, 60M customer target by 2030.
- $18.0B+ adjusted free cash flow in 2026
- $23B–$24B CAPEX target in 2026
- Converged rate of 45% (% of homes that bundle with wireless plan)
Quotable: re: Satellite and Cell Towers
“…we handle 98%+ of the traffic they need to get on and off the internet once we have a converged customer through mobile and our fixed services. Occasionally they walk off the network. They get in their boat and they maybe go out beyond the coast, or they go to a national park where we don’t have coverage. What I talked about handling the corner cases, it’s those moments where they walk off the network. It’s the 2%. It’s what something like a satellite constellation would be good for.”
John Stankey | CEO, AT&T
Quotable: re: Potential of a wholesale agreement with a satellite provider
“Speaking more broadly about satellite and satellite’s competition on a directed device, I tried to be pretty deliberate in my comments. We sit here today with everything we need to put the best product in the market. I’m not betting on the next turn of a chip. I don’t need any fantastic developments in technology in any way, shape, or form to do what I need to do. It’s not rocket science for what we need to do to be successful in the market. We’re doing that today, and I think we can build the best converged product today, and we can be in the market and be effective and penetrate today. When we think about a wholesale arrangement, as I’ve said before, the motivation for a wholesale arrangement is always to get at a part of the market that you can’t get at yourself.”
John Stankey | CEO, AT&T
T-Mobile
- 277,000 postpaid net account additions full-year guidance of 950K–1.05M was raised in Q1 and reaffirmed in Q2
- Broadband net additions in the “upper 400,000s”
- Target of 18M–19M broadband customers by 2030, including 3M–4M on fiber
- US Cellular (UScellular) integration on track, migration largely completed during 2026
- $18.1B–$18.7B → $18.4B–$18.8B adjusted free cash flow in 2026 (raised in Q2, reflecting lower cash taxes)
- $10.0B CAPEX in 2026 was reaffirmed
Quotable: re: TMUS Fixed Wireless Model / Fallow Capacity Model
“..FWA does consume a fair amount of our capacity, but this is where the numerator-denominator issue comes in, right? It consumes a fair amount of our traffic today, which is not the same thing as a fair amount of our capacity. Our capacity is several times multiple of the traffic that we hold today. So, we feel very comfortable with where we are with FWA today. One other piece, I think you said ostensibly fallow-capacity model. Just to be clear, it is actually a complete fallow-capacity model. The way we think about capacity to go through something I think we’ve talked about before is at a hex bin level, and there’s 36 million hex bins. We sit down and forecast the growth of wireless traffic. Then, we put a cap on the market share that we’re going to be able to get on FWA, and the rest of the capacity is then the fallow capacity, and all of this is done at peak hour. All of this was done excluding any new spectrum coming in or technology innovation. That’s what took us to our guidance of 15 million customers.”
Srini Gopalan | CEO, T-Mobile US
Quotable: re: Starlink and the complementary nature of LEO
“Direct-to-cell is really a technology that in many ways we worked with Starlink to invent. It’s the first scale deployment of that. What we’ve learned over the last four years is it is a complementary category. If you look at our usage in, the last time I talked about 0.0002% of our network usage. That’s three zeros and a two being on satellite. In our busiest summer months, that went to 0.0003%. It’s a really small percentage of the usage on our network, and it is a complementary service. What we always do, which was we future cast the direction of this industry and then work back from that to figure out the right strategy for us.”
Srini Gopalan | CEO, T-Mobile US
Quotable: re: Competition between fixed wireless and fiber
“Actually, for us, in a lot of these areas, it’s not a competition between fiber and FWA. These are actually complementary products because when we can sell a fiber customer, we’re actually freeing up fallow capacity to be able to sell in a broader area because the cell radiuses of mobile are actually very large, where we can sell that slot to another customer elsewhere.”
André Almeida | Chief Broadband, Enterprise, and Emerging Business Office, T-Mobile US
