Analysis of Q3 2025 Earnings: T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon
The third quarter of 2025 brought major changes across the telecom landscape. Amidst champagne being uncorked, T-Mobile led the pack with record postpaid growth, a completed UScellular acquisition, closing out Mike Sievert’s final quarter as CEO, and the commencement of Srini Gopalan’s tenure. AT&T made a bold move with its $23 billion EchoStar spectrum acquisition, doubling down on 5G and fiber expansion. Meanwhile, Verizon announced that Dan Schulman will succeed Hans Vestberg as CEO, refocusing on efficiency, partnerships, and long-term broadband growth. Together, the big three are redefining how wireless, fiber, and fixed wireless connect in the next chapter of 5G.
T-Mobile
Mike Sievert's final earnings call as CEO, Srini Gopalan will be T-Mobile's next Chief Executive Officer, effective November 1, 2025 (announced on September 22, 2025)
T-Mobile’s acquisition of UScellular’s wireless operations and select spectrum assets closed on August 1, 2025
+2.3M postpaid customer additions (best ever and best industry)
+ 1M postpaid phone net adds, (best Q3 in a decade)
+506,000 broadband net customer additions
+54,000 fiber customer additions
Raised full-year outlook forecasting postpaid net customer adds of 7.2M to 7.4M, compared to 6.1M to 6.4M previously
Raised fiber customer net additions guidance to 130,000 in 2025
$4.8B in free cash flow
Guidance raised $200M on low end, to ($17.8B-18B for 2025)
CAPEX expectation of $10.0B, increase of $500M driven by UScellular integration
Quotable: re: Fixed Wireless
The way we think about both those businesses is setting them up in a way that the economics allow us to pursue the uncarrier strategy. What I love about 5G fixed wireless access is the heart of it is the fallow capacity model. What weʼre benefiting from is the ultra-capacity network, but also the rapid evolution youʼre seeing in mobile technology, which is moving far quicker than a lot of other technologies, which is giving us more and more runway and also making the product incredibly sustainable. We see 5G fixed wireless access as not a temporary category, but something thatʼs here to stay as mobile technology gets better and better and taps into a customer need, which a lot of people trapped in old relationships with incumbents are suffering from.
Srini Gopalan | COO and Incoming CEO, T-Mobile US
Quotable: re: Fiber
The way weʼve thought about fiber is go after specific places where weʼre confident that the economics will work for us to create a win-win situation for customers. Thatʼs been the heart of the areas that weʼve picked fiber, places where weʼre either first to fiber, near first to fiber, places where we believe we can set up these JVs that allow us to be capital light.”
Srini Gopalan | COO and Incoming CEO, T-Mobile US
Quotable: re: Spectrum
The difference between us and others is that they might be in a business place where they need to act right now at these elevated prices, where we have the ability to be patient and pick our moments on spectrum. We see those moments coming. As Srini says, we will not just defend, but extend our lead over time and certainly entering those with a strong balance sheet element of it. I just love your point that then, like now, we will be thoughtful and we will be great stewards of your capital.
Mike Sievert | President and CEO (Outgoing), T-Mobile US Inc
Quotable: re: Champagne being served at the earnings call:
“You guys, it's been an honor and a privilege of a lifetime to be the CEO. I look forward to continuing to support this team in my new role. I promise we don't plan to spend the day running your company day drinking. Thanks for joining the call, everybody. Cheers.”
Mike Sievert | President and CEO (Outgoing), T-Mobile US Inc
AT&T
AT&T announced on August 26, 2025 that it will acquire wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar in a $23 billion all-cash deal, covering nearly every U.S. market with mid- and low-band frequencies
The acquisition will accelerate AT&T’s 5G and fixed wireless rollout while strengthening its converged wireless and home internet strategy
EchoStar will use the proceeds to reduce debt and maintain a wholesale network agreement with AT&T, allowing its Boost Mobile operations to continue using AT&T’s network
+405,000 postpaid phone net customer additions
+270,000 fixed wireless net customer additions
+288,000 fiber customer additions (10.1M total subscribers)
$4.9B in free cash flow ($4.6B in same period in 2024, low to mid $16B range forecast through EOY 2025)
$4.9B in CAPEX ($16.8B-$17.3B for year 2025 so far)
41% of AT&T Fiber households have AT&T for wireless
Lumen transaction pending early 2026 close
Quotable: re: AT&T M&A
"Dave, first of all, I'm never going to answer a question absolutely and say never. But I will tell you what I've shared with the management team, which is we have all the assets in front of us, and we've run the plays that we need to run to be successful over the next five years and everything that's going on outside of our business right now is external and distraction."
John Stankey | CEO, AT&T
Quotable: re: Role of satellites, and will they replace cell towers
"The way I think about it is mostly complementary, and I can give you my reasons for that in a minute. But there's going to be places where the LEO constellation becomes maybe a better alternative to a terrestrial solution. Certainly in the IoT space, there's going to be circumstances where it might be easier to use LEO to solve certain types of IoT-related applications. That will be part of the innovation of what they bring forward. Complete replacement of terrestrial wireless networks strikes me as a -- it's probably not that it couldn't be done, but it would require an awful lot of time and money. I think you can probably ask Charlie Ergen about that people don't always recognize the fact that we do deploy cell sites, and that's part of our capital deployment. We do an awful lot of deployment of capital inside buildings Hospitals, stadiums, high-rises, hotels, those are things that are easily served necessarily from just laying up some 40 megahertz of spectrum on a satellite. And so if you really want a cohesive network that is going to deliver on the kind of AI demands moving forward, which is really managing traffic aggressively, giving strong quality of service on the uplink low latency, I would tell you that just generally speaking, it takes a lot of engineering to do that. It's embedded over years and years of deployment of capital and work. It's not replaced quickly. It's not necessarily optimal to see from the sky."
"And when you have over 300 megahertz of spectrum in a 2-mile radius, it's really hard to see 40 megahertz of spectrum over a 20-mile radius, replacing that capacity, especially when you multiply the fact that there are providers on a stick that are doing that and have those kind of scaled networks that have massive backhaul at that cell site 10 gig or better. It's hard to replace that, and it's also hard to outperform that from a performance perspective."
"So I do believe they can be really complementary. I believe that ultimately hybrid networks can play. I think it's very hard in an AI world to build a hybrid network that's going to deliver the kind of performance indoor and outdoor over time that we're building. That's why we think fiber is so important. When you have dense fiber and you can pick up workloads closer to the customer, you're always going to have a better performing network and a more scalable network and a network that operates at a lower marginal cost. And that's our belief in why we're playing the way we're playing"
John Stankey | CEO, AT&T
Verizon
Hans Vestburg was replaced with Dan Schulman (former CEO of Paypal) as new Chief Executive Officer as of Verizon, announced on October 6th, 2025
On October 27th, 2025 Verizon and Tillman Global Holdings announced a partnership to expand fiber to customers - a "capital-light approach", differing from the Frontier transaction with lower upfront investment reflecting a hybrid approach (acquisitions(Frontier) versus partnership (Tillman))
44,000 postpaid phone net customer additions
-7,000 postpaid phone net losses (business added 51,000)
+261,000 fixed wireless net customer additions
+61,000 fiber customer additions
$7.0B in free cash flow ($15.8B through Q3 - increase from $14.5B through same period in 2024)
$4.3B in CAPEX ($12.3B through Q3)
Frontier Transaction - on track for Q1/2026 close (approvals received from 11 of 13 states)
Quotable: re: Convergence
"Convergence is one of our most significant near-term growth opportunities. The pending acquisition of Frontier will enable us to serve approximately 29 million fiber passings, creating a massive cross-sell opportunity. Our wireless share significantly under-indexes in Frontier's territory, and we intend to address this on day one."
"I'm a very big believer in convergence. I think it is extremely powerful. I think it offers not just meaningful revenue synergies, but as Tony mentioned and as we see when you combine mobility with fiber, you see churn rates that are almost 40% less than what we see with our traditional mobility. "
Dan Schulman | CEO, Verizon
Quotable: re: Verizon Goals and Priorities
"Our goals and our priorities are clear. First, delighting our customers to meaningfully increase our share of industry net adds. Second, cost transformation, fundamentally restructuring our expense base. Third, capital efficiency, optimizing how and where we invest, and fourth, accelerating shareholder returns by increasing our bottom line growth and a steadfast commitment to our dividend. You can expect to see a tangible difference in the way Verizon competes going forward."
Dan Schulman | CEO, Verizon