- Verizon’s CEO said it’s looking for more fiber acquisitions
- AT&T’s CEO said it will have to invest significantly to scale Lumen’s mass market assets
- T-Mobile’s CEO said it’s interested in pure-play fiber assets and has no interest in acquiring cable companies
Fiber is grabbing its share of the spotlight at the three Tier 1 wireless providers. During their Q1 2026 earnings calls, all three carriers spent a significant amount of time talking about fiber and convergence.
They also talked about big broadband acquisitions. Verizon closed its acquisition of Frontier Communications; AT&T closed its purchase of Lumen’s mass market broadband assets; and T-Mobile announced two new joint ventures to expand its fiber footprint.
T-Mobile's new fiber JVs
Recently, T-Mobile announced two new joint ventures to acquire the fiber companies GoNetspeed, Greenlight Networks and i3 Broadband.
On its Q1 2026 earnings call T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan talked about the new JVs. He said T-Mobile is focused on fiber opportunities that bring in profit, and he dismissed the idea of “convergence” that the other Tier 1 wireless operators talk about. Of course T-Mobile has far less fiber than AT&T and Verizon, so it would make sense that he would downplay convergence.
“The reason we're doing fiber is much more because we see an equity value creation opportunity rather than the myth of convergence,” said Gopalan. “What we know so far is our fiber JVs, the ones we've launched so far, are well on track. They're delivering exactly what we expected. The lift from the T-Mobile brand and our distribution is completely in line with our expectations.”
He said there is no magic number T-Mobile is chasing in terms of ultimate homes passed with fiber. “We're looking for places where we can create true equity value. Do we have appetite for cases which create true equity value and which tick the box for us in terms of actually being an opportunity that is monetarily sound? Yes.”
An analyst asked if operating T-Fiber through joint ventures was the most efficient tactic.
André Almeida, T-Mobile’s chief broadband, enterprise & emerging business officer, said T-Mobile looks at the JVs from a creation-of-shareholder-value perspective. “That includes making sure we have partners that are experts in deploying fiber, experts in managing this deployment business, but also have strong local footprints and the ability to build in an efficient manner in each of these geographies,” said Almeida.
He said T-Mobile is not looking at a master plan to have fiber everywhere.
Almeida said it’s also important to T-Mobile that it has JV partners that bring the right technology. “It's very important for us that these are pure-play fiber assets. We've done it with the first two deals with Lumos and Metronet, and we've done it now with these two JVs that we set up.”
He noted that T-Mobile has integrated the fiber JVs with a common IT platform so that they look like one single operation from T-Mobile’s perspective as well as from its customers' perspective.
“So we take scale where scale matters, where it's more important to have local knowledge and local scale, we will take that,” said Almeida.
On one final note, Gopalan put to rest any speculation that T-Mobile was interested in cable broadband assets. He said, “Cable is not something we're interested in. We see our strength as attacking incumbents rather than becoming an incumbent. We see a huge opportunity to attack incumbents across fiber and FWA. That will be our key play.”
Verizon's Frontier buy
Verizon CFO Anthony Skiadas talked about the company's acquisition of Frontier. He said, “Frontier accelerates our opportunity to grow our broadband subscribers as well as our converged offerings, a key enabler to growing wireless share in under-penetrated Frontier markets."
Verizon CEO Daniel Schulman added that “We're looking at more partnerships, potential acquisitions to speed the number of homes passed. We think that fiber is a key differentiator against the competitors who don't have it.”
During Q1, the company reported 341,000 broadband net adds: 214,000 fixed wireless access (FWA) net adds and 127,000 fiber net adds. It now has about 16.8 million broadband subscribers.
Schulman said, “We are solidly on track to have more than 32 million fiber passings by the end of this year.” And speaking about convergence, he said, “We have a huge cross-sell opportunity. Only 20% of our base has broadband. And so, we see a large go-to-market opportunity for us there.”
AT&T's Lumen adds
AT&T CEO John Stankey said that during Q1 2026, AT&T closed its transaction with Lumen Technologies ahead of schedule, adding 1.1 million fiber customers and over 4 million fiber locations passed.
AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said the company is already “scaling Lumen” to drive incremental fiber penetration into that footprint. “We said coming into the year that early on we're going to have to invest significantly in order to stand up that organization. That process began in earnest in Q1 and will continue.”
For the first quarter, AT&T reported 584,000 total fiber and fixed wireless customer net additions, (273,000 fiber net adds and 239,000 Internet Air net adds.)
Overall, AT&T passes over 37 million customer locations with fiber, and it’s on track to reach 60 million-plus locations by 2030.
In terms of convergence, AT&T rolled out its OneConnect offer during the quarter, which is a bundle of wireless and fiber broadband for a flat monthly price.
Of OneConnect, Stankey said, “This is how you should expect us to go to market as we accelerate the expansion of our fiber availability with offers and marketing strategies that yield attractive returns by driving deeper fiber penetration and growth in converged customer relationships.”
He said AT&T is getting more 1-to-2 line wireless customers, and if they sign up for OneConnect, which includes fiber, they’re likely to be AT&T customers for a long time because fiber garners “the highest brand love of any product in the market.” And these 1-to-2 line customers are likely to add more lines in the future as they have families.
Stankey added, “I don't mean to harp on fiber, but once you get that in place with a customer, it's a really good place, not only because it's the lowest marginal cost to carry a bit of any technology that's available out there, but its performance is superior.”