At&t Inc. (T) Q3 2026 earnings call transcript

At&t Inc. (T) held its earnings call for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 on 21 October 2026. What follows is my machine transcription of the company's public webcast, made on 21 October 2026, and not the company's official text.

A machine mis-hears names and numbers, so where one reads oddly, the webcast is the record. This recording is not split by speaker.

Transcript

Good morning and welcome to AT&T's 3rd quarter, 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance during the call, please press star then zero and an operator will assist you offline. Following the presentation, the call will be open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star then one and you will be placed in the question queue. If you are in the question queue and would like to withdraw your question, you can do so by pressing star then two.

And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference call over to our host, Brett Feldman, Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you and good morning. Welcome to our 3rd quarter call. I'm Brett Feldman, Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations for AT&T. Joining me on the call today are John Stanky, our Chairman and CEO and Pascal Duroch, our CFO. We are also joined today by our Deputy CFO, Jennifer Byrie.

Before we begin, I need to call your attention to our Safe Harbor Statement. It says that some of our comments today may be forward-looking. As such, they are subject to risks and uncertainties described in AT&T's SEC filings. Results may differ materially. Additional information as well as our earnings materials are available on the Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn things over to John. Thanks, Brett. Good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining us today. We continued the momentum we established in the first half of the year, delivering another strong quarter that reflects durable growth from our investment-led strategy.

During the quarter, we added over 1 million advanced connectivity subscribers from fiber, six wireless, and post-paid phone, our best quarter in more than four years, and our second consecutive quarter with more than 1 million net ads across these services. These are high-quality customer relationships, and we continue to see growth in accounts that select AT&T for both their wireless and internet connectivity. Our improved gains in subscribers and converged accounts are driving strong financial results. In the third quarter, we achieved 3.8% year-over-year growth and consolidated service revenue, our best performance in more than four years.

It was also our second consecutive quarter with adjusted EBITDA growth above 5%, and adjusted EPS growth above 20%. Our strong operating and financial performance reflects balanced growth across our portfolio of 5G and fiber services in both the consumer and business sectors. We're achieving these results through consistent execution against our core priorities, which are growing, converged customer relationships, operating with greater efficiency, and investing for durable growth and attractive returns. At the end of the third quarter, nearly 43% of our advanced home internet customers also had a postpaid wireless account with AT&T.

We added approximately 350,000 customer relationships to our base of converged accounts in the third quarter, which is a faster pace of sequential growth than we achieved in the second quarter. This includes momentum and territories we acquired from Lumen, where converged penetration is increased by 250 basis points since we closed the transaction in early February. Our fiber reach has never been greater, our spectrum position has never been stronger, and we're reaching into this large underpenetrated opportunity with new plans and pricing strategies designed to bring more converged customers onto our network.

As we expand our fiber reach, we're using tiered introductory pricing to build penetration and anchor the home early across a wide range of customer cohorts that we can grow our business with over time by attaching wireless and other high-value services and features. With fiber, this is a differentiated and effective go-to-market strategy that we're able to execute efficiently as a result of our local operating scale and owners' economics across 5G and fiber. We're also removing friction for consumers by constructing plans built around simplicity, transparent value and convergence, by investing in digital experiences that allow customers to do business with us the way they want to, and by offering peace of mind through America's best guarantee.

By continuing to put our service and customer experience at the forefront of our customer value proposition and shunting uneconomical device offers, we are well positioned to drive durable, converged relationships. We saw improved traction with business accounts in the quarter and achieved our second consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in business advanced connectivity service revenues. Our performance reflects improved sales execution across direct, indirect and digital channels, greater penetration of fiber and fixed wireless, and better positioning with business customers that need reliable, secure and high-capacity, converged connectivity across multiple locations.

Our broad and deep fiber network also has this well-positioned to be a leader in AI-grade connectivity. Over 90 percent of mapped U.S. data centers are within 10 miles of our fiber and over 80 percent are within one mile. This is one of the reasons why the nation's leading hyperscalers are working with AT&T to support their rapidly growing high-capacity connectivity needs. This includes AWS, who is using AT&T to connect their locations with high-capacity fiber. We're also working with Microsoft to support its high-capacity needs as AI growth drives demand.

These moves are simply foundational to drive sustainable value by layering high-margin services and network intelligence on top of that fiber to connect growing AI workloads across the entire ecosystem, including business endpoints, Metro aggregation, and managed multi-vendor cloud ingress and egress. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. The strength of our performance comes from the structural advantages we've established after years of consistent and targeted investment. In the dense urban and suburban areas where we deploy both fiber and 5G infrastructure at scale, we believe that our competitors cannot and will not match our operating proficiency, network performance, or exceptional converged value proposition.

By the end of this decade, we expect to operate the most advanced and technologically open communications network in the U.S., built on a foundation of dense interconnected Metro fiber and a nationwide wireless network that I should mention already functions at scale indoors and out. This asset base puts us in a leading position to serve converged consumer and business customers today and well into the future as AI becomes a key driver of their connectivity needs and requires ever-improving high-performance networking.

Over the past few weeks, we've announced several agreements that further advance our goal of being the leading provider of advanced connectivity in the U.S. This includes the launch of our joint venture to help close coverage gaps by making satellite-enabled connectivity easier to deliver where traditional service is limited. We announced an agreement with global infrastructure partners, a part of BlackRock, and CPP investments to form a JV that includes giga power and the fiber assets we acquired from Lumen in order to accelerate fiber deployment outside of our traditional operating territories.

We also reached a multi-year agreement with Corning to supply the fiber we need to support our goal of reaching 60 million plus fiber locations by the end of this decade. We signed an agreement to sell our wireless business in Mexico. Combined with our industry-leading capital investment and recent acquisitions of Spectrum from EchoStar and Fiber from Lumen, these agreements sharpen our U.S. investment focus, strengthen our convergence strategy, and position AT&T to have the leading share in advanced connectivity service revenue by the end of the decade.

On the cost and simplicity side, we continue to make significant progress in our work to exit less efficient copper-based legacy services. We're putting our customers at the center of this transition, and we're working with them to upgrade to newer, more reliable services like phone advanced, fiber, and internet air. Our progress here is picking at momentum, and we now have more than 100 wire centers with no customers supported by legacy services. This is an industry-first at scale, and we're on track to reach our target of discontinuing copper-based services in 50 percent of our wire centers outside of California by the end of 2027, and substantially all of them by the end of 2029.

We still have a lot of work to do here, but we've put ourselves on a path to remove significant cost and complexity as we remove outdated technologies from service. As we accelerate this work, we believe we have a meaningful medium-term opportunity to monetize the copper embedded in our legacy network. As I close, I think many of you are aware that this will be Pascal's final quarterly report. I know he'll tell you that his tenure has been a relaxing walk in the park, and that nearly six years has raced by, but it's fair to say much has been expected of him over this period.

It's also fair to say he delivered on those expectations. I could not have asked for a better partner and leader to support the transformation of AT&T's business model. His story is an inspiring story of solid values, quiet determination, respecting care for others, and a daily focus to solve problems on behalf of shareholders and the company. I know I speak for the broader team at AT&T when I say we'll miss his daily presence, but we'll be forever grateful for his leadership and outsized contributions.

And now for the final time, Pascal, over to you. Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. At a consolidated level, total revenues in the third quarter was up 5.3 percent year over year, with service revenues growing 3.8 percent. Adjusted EBITDA grew 5.4 percent year over year, and we achieved an Adjust EBITDA margin of 38.7 percent. This is our highest third quarter consolidated Adjust EBITDA margin since we refocus our business on advanced connectivity at the beginning of this decade.

And we achieved this record despite 12 percent growth in equipment revenue, which is dilutive to margins. This highlights the continued improvement in our underlying operating leverage as we grow our base of converged customers and achieve efficiencies from our transformation initiatives. For the full year, we continue to expect consolidated service revenues to grow in the low single digit range, and now expect consolidated Adjust EBITDA to grow in the upper portion of the 3 to 4 percent range.

During the fourth quarter, we expect our Adjust EBITDA growth will be impacted by higher marketing and other customer acquisition costs compared to last year driven by an extended device launch cycle and our expanded fiber go-to-market opportunity, as well as unfavorable vendor dispute settlements of approximately 100 million dollars that will primarily impact our legacy segment. Adjust EPS of 65 cents was up 20 percent from 54 cents in the third quarter of 2025 driven primarily by growth in Adjust EBITDA and lower depreciation expense.

Our third quarter results reflects two notable adjustments, including a $2.6 billion non-cash and payment charge related to our agreement to sell AT&T Mexico and a roughly $800 million employee separation charge that will impact cash primarily in 2027. For the full year, we now expect Adjust EPS in the $2.40 range compared to our prior outlook of $2.25 to $2.35 primarily because of lower depreciation expense related to health for sale accounting for AT&T Mexico. Capital investment was $5.6 billion in the third quarter, up roughly $300 million dollars year over year.

Consistent with our outlook, free cash flow was approximately $5 billion, essentially stable compared to the third quarter of 2025. For the fourth quarter, we expect free cash flow of approximately $6 billion compared to $4.2 billion in the fourth quarter of last year. This primarily reflects an outlook for higher cash from operations compared to last year when our fourth quarter results were impacted by discrete items, including a large contribution to our pension and legal settlements. For the full year, we continue to expect $18 billion plus a free cash flow with $23 to $24 billion of capital investment.

We now expect cash taxes in the $750 million range for the year compared to our prior outlook of $1 billion to $1.5 billion as we continue to benefit from the provisions in last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Compared to our initial outlook, this is offset by higher cash interest payments, which primarily reflects higher gross debt and interest rates, as well as increase investments in working capital driven primarily by higher upfront spending on devices and other customer acquisition costs as we drive higher levels of customer additions across our advanced connectivity services.

In our earnings release, we reiterated our long-term outlook for consolidated growth in service revenues, adjust EBITDA, adjust DPS, as well as our outlook for free cash flow through 2028. As a reminder, our long-term outlook is presented on a continuing operations basis and excludes our Mexico wireless business beginning in 2027. As we continue to extend our industry leading scale and fiber, we are becoming more effective in how we plan, build, install, and calibrate the pace of our network deployment.

We believe this positions us to reach 60 million plus locations with fiber by the end of the decade with annual capital investment that is roughly $1 billion lower than we previously planned. For 2027 and 2028, this represents annual capital investment in the $22 to $23 billion range. Based on the attractive opportunity we see to grow fiber and convert customers as we expand our fiber reach, we expect to reallocate this capital into the business primarily through working capital in support of customer acquisition investments as well as higher interest payment.

We will provide more color on the drivers that support our outlook for $19 billion plus a free cash flow in 2027 as part of our fourth quarter earnings report early next year. Our consolidated growth continues to be driven by momentum within our advanced connectivity segment. Advanced connectivity service revenues grew 6.1 percent year over year with EBITDA increasing 7.3 percent. Wireless service revenues grew 5 percent year over year driven primarily by growth in our subscriber base and a 4 percent growth in post paid phone output.

This reflects greater execution of our wireless pricing strategy including the impact of our new and refreshed rate plans as well as our consistent approach to managing back book pricing across the base. We remain focused on adding the right customers on the right plans with the right offers. This approach resulted in 379,000 post paid phone net ads during a competitive third quarter with stable year over year post paid phone churn of 0.92 percent and strong margin contribution.

Advanced home internet service revenues grew more than 23 percent year over year in the third quarter driven by the increase in our customer base. We achieved 696,000 advanced home internet net ads in the third quarter including 416,000 AT&T fiber net ads and 280,000 in net air net ads. This was a record quarter for combined net ads across these services driven by the significant increase in our fiber reach our deeper mid band spectrum position positive seasonal dynamics and strong uptake of our introductory pricing.

During the fourth quarter we expected our advanced home internet net ads will moderate as we typically see lower demand in this category during the holiday season. Fiber ARP will decline 4 percent year over year in the third quarter. This reflects a range of factors including traction with our introductory pricing, our growing base of converged accounts that earn discounts and growth in lower ARP will fiber customers on the quantum brand in territories we acquired from Lumen. In the near term we expect fiber ARP will continue to be impacted by these dynamics including during the fourth quarter when we anticipate a similar year over year decline compared to our third quarter results.

But as we've discussed before our goal is to optimize growth in total advanced connectivity service revenue in EBITDA not specific operating metrics and we believe that our third quarter results highlight how we are improving overall margins while driving balanced and profitable growth across our portfolio. This includes another quarter of improved momentum in business advanced connectivity service revenues which grew two and a half percent year over year with fiber and advanced connectivity service revenues growing nearly nine percent.

We achieve solid growth across wireless fiber and fixed wireless which is now consistently resetting structural pressures on transitional services such as VPN and wholesale. We exited the third quarter with great operating momentum and we continued to expect full year advanced connectivity service revenue growth of five percent plus and EBITDA growth of six percent plus. In our legacy segment service revenues declined approximately 25 percent year over year consistent with our expectation for continued 20 percent plus declines as we power down copper based services and migrate customers to more advanced and reliable technologies.

Legacy EBITDA declined about 27 percent and we continue to make progress taking costs out of the business as we ramp the retirement of legacy wire centers. As I noted earlier our fourth quarter results will be impacted by unfavorable vendor dispute settlements that will be primarily reported within the legacy segment. Copper retirement remains an integral part of our overall cost transformation and we remain on pace to achieve our target of four billion in annual consolidated cost savings by the end of 2028.

We ended the third quarter with net debt just EBITDA of 3.13 times up from 2.68 times in the second quarter which reflects our 23 billion dollar purchase of spectrum licenses from Echo Star at the end of July. The transaction materially deepened our low and mid band spectrum holdings and puts us in a great position to execute our strategy. We continue to expect net debt to just EBITDA to return to a level consistent with our target in the two and a half times range during 2029.

This will be achieved through growth in adjusted EBITDA and debt repayment using excess cash flow and proceeds in 2027 from closing our fiber JV and the plant sale of our Mexico wireless business. We return 4.8 billion to shareholders during the third quarter including 2.8 billion of share repurchases. Through the end of the third quarter we repurchased over 7 billion dollars of stock this year and we continue to target approximately 10 billion dollars of share repurchases in 2026.

Before I move on to the Q&A I want to take a moment to thank everyone on the call. Over the years your thoughtful questions and candid perspective have sharpened my thinking and made every conversation more valuable. I'm grateful for your engagement. I'm really proud of the work we have done here over the past five plus years and as a shareholder I'm very pleased that Jennifer will be stepping into the CFO role after the new year. Brett we're now ready for the Q&A.

Thank you Pascal. Operator we are ready to take the first question. We will now begin the Q&A session. To ask a question please press star then one. If you're using a speakerphone please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question please press star then two. At this time we will pause to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from John Hudlick with UBS. Please go ahead. Great good morning guys and before we get I just want to say congrats to Pascal on your retirement it's been great working with you and welcome to Jennifer.

Maybe for John if we could start first with the fiber strategy could you talk a little bit about your sort of goals in terms of penetration rates. You had been talking about a 40 percent penetration rate and now I think you have aspirations to get to 50 just based on what you're seeing in the market and from competition and fixed wireless penetration is 50 percent still sort of the expectation and could it go higher and maybe what are you seeing in the movement market.

And then as a follow-up John to your commentary about the signal the wireless signal radiating internally I'm seeing a lot of questions about the Starlink mobile strategy just can you any high level thoughts on the use of a LEO constellation to provide mobile service and maybe what it would take to build out a terrestrial footprint to complement that service and match what you get from from from AT&T from a mobile standpoint. Thanks. Good morning John so our fiber actually my fiber goals would be to have a hundred percent penetration but they take a little while to get there.

I think we have to step back and say that we have limitations to this over time. We clearly you know when we think about how we invest in an area we do our economics assuming we can get to a terminal penetration rate of 40 and we we don't want to go invest any place where we don't think we can get adequate returns at that level. That's not what our internal objectives are we believe we can exceed that level.

What I've shared with you before is we have a pretty straightforward process that gets us from 0 to 40 in terms of tactics and timing. The 40 to 50 range is a little bit different takes a little bit more time takes a variety of different tactics and it comes you know with persistence and consistency and frankly it will lean a lot on us being very successful on more converged customers to get there and so still fully believe that's achievable and I would expect that as we go forward you've heard me say that we have a lot of different plays that we can run obviously in all markets I'd love to be able to get to that 50 penetration with a direct retail relationship but I've also shared with you that in this in this company and in this industry it is not beyond any expectation that you wouldn't have some wholesale at some point in time and you know we got a lot of capacity on that network.

We could literally handle 100% of the customers in an area if they all came to us so I want to make sure that we're putting all that capacity to use over the long haul and if we hit a place in particular markets for example where we think we've reached our ability to penetrate under our brand as this matures over time is it possible that we might open up the network and have others sell on top of it to drive penetration and returns up I wouldn't rule that out over the long haul so I think there's more innings to play in this game as we move forward.

The lumen markets as you know and we shared when we acquired the asset were under penetrated comparatively to what AT&T markets might have been but they're saying build tenure and so what we've been doing as you're aware is trying to convert all those markets to AT&T branded fiber we're just about through that process we have a couple left to go to finish that up as we convert those markets to the AT&T branded fiber as we put the business processes in place that we have honed in our other operating regions and apply them to those markets we're seeing penetration march up that penetration is marching up in a manner that's consistent with the business case that we outlined in our goals I think we shared with you we did the transaction that we expected the terminal penetration levels of our outer region markets to be somewhat lower than the terminal penetration levels of our embedded traditional markets that again was done to put some conservatism in the business case with what I'm seeing right now maybe with that is a little too conservative we'll see as time marches on and as I shared in my remarks the other advantage we're seeing is increasing in the convergence rate we're up 250 basis points since you know the march end of February acquisition and that is part of the reason you're seeing you know the strong margin performance in the wireless business as well so I feel really good about where those are and where we're going to go over the long haul in terms of what it takes to build a converged scaled converging network which is what I believe everybody is marching into here and what you know some of the new entrants are talking about needing to do it takes a lot I'm maybe not the best person to reference on that I might you know next time you bump into Charlie you should talk to him and ask him what it took and and how many years and complications that come up and doing those types of things it's not something that gets done overnight I wouldn't over rotate on you know what I would call one carrier of low dance spectrum I mean let's put this in perspective in our scaled network we run depending on the metro somewhere between six to eight carriers of low dance spectrum in addition that spectrum is not just housed on macro antenna sites it exists on every indoor building system and high rises and hospitals and stadiums I've shared with you that you can go into a metropolitan area like Chicago and look at the traffic on the network and somewhere between 40 to 45 percent of the traffic on any given day is traffic that's originated from inside of a building and as a result of that how you perform indoors of course is extremely important and we shouldn't think about those as being nominal loads there there are significant loads even with robust Wi-Fi networks that are out there so I think it takes a lot of years and a huge level investment to get to the kind of performance levels that customers have become accustomed to in scaled networks that are running on the infrastructure that most of the the incumbent providers have today so you know I think there's going to be continued advances we're certainly excited about the continued advances in Leo technology and now it might help us at the edges of our network and and preventing folks from walking off the network how it might help us in places where we have less density and maybe we can lower our cost structure rather than putting less used macro sites in place serving those differently but we've got the scale where the scale matters you know 98 percent of the traffic is where we've already built and where we already have capabilities and customers have become accustomed to a level of service that is pretty high and rightfully so they pay us a lot for for what they get from us and they should expect it to work so that's my point if you want it I feel really good about where we're at and I feel really good that we're going to have the best converged set of assets out there both with fiber and and our robust wireless network to meet those expectations moving forward especially in the upstream.

I thanks for the question John operator we'll go to the next one. The next question comes from Michael Rawlins with City please go ahead. I was going to send my congratulations to Pascal in the upcoming retirement and welcome to Jennifer. Two questions if I could. So you know first if you feel down further on the broadband RPU and can you share what you're seeing in terms of the performance of broadband RPUs and revenue in your more established mature fiber markets relative to the expansion markets and do you see broadband returning to some degree of annual pricing power whether it's through the speed gear mix feature upsells or the simply changes in retail pricing over time and then secondly John you referred to some of the AI opportunities earlier AT&T and just curious what are the signals that you're currently seeing in the network from enterprises hyperscalers and consumers in terms of early uptake of data traffic and consumption and how customers may be engaging with you differently in terms of how they're looking to invest in connectivity with AT&T.

Thanks. Good morning Michael. So the way I think about broadband RPUs what we want is a portfolio of customers that basically buy from us at all discrete price points and I think you've heard us talk about the fact that we've been somewhat under penetrated and maybe more of the value segments. That's true to both in our wireless business as well as our fixed business and I see no reason that especially when you're building a network that has the kind of capacity that if fiber network has that we shouldn't think about we want to play in every segment we just want to play in those segments at the right price point and I think in our what I would call our more mature markets if you went in and looked at them what you would see is a very nice distribution of folks that are at higher price points because we went in marketed largely as premium and it was premium and we're now coming back and doing the cleanup on convergence to pick up additional households and in some cases we're going in with different price points and a different performing product you know we want to make sure that the price point is matched to the performance of the particular product think rate and speed and we think that getting that consolidated account and makes sense and as a result of that you get some deterioration and average RPUs and I don't want to focus on that exclusively what we want to focus on is the fact that you're seeing great service for revenue growth in our business you're seeing great customer account growth you're seeing margin a margin equation that is fantastic in my view based on the kind of growth we're going through and when I have that kind of equation showing up that's how I want the team to move forward and how we should think about these things and in terms of your point of your question on what happens in the future I think what happens in the future is what's happened in the past that is you have those relationships and they're good and customers like the product and they stay with you and we have every reason to believe that a converged customer that's sitting on fiber is going to be a sticky and high lifetime value customer we shared that with you they're going to naturally based on their needs and capabilities that they desire they'll probably buy up over time and so just because we bring somebody in at a more value-oriented price point early on and we can offer you know at a price point that matches fixed wireless a better performing product I think the future is bright because at some point that household is going to take advantage of the things that you just referenced like more capabilities around AI or they have more children or whatever it might be that caused them to say I need to take up to a higher speed tier and we'll be able to do that without breaking a sweat because the networks there and can easily do that on a software adjustment and we don't have to add incremental capacity in the infrastructure to do that so I expect there's going to be good stability in that our pool over time and the enterprise segment well Mike one other point I would remind you as as recent as last December we had a pretty meaningful price increase that impacted much of our fiber base so it's you know consistent with John's response we have a history of being able to manage the base of pricing across both products in the enterprise segment on AI what we're seeing right now is what I would call there's just increased workloads that are going on mostly into the cloud that people need capacity for to deal with what the discussions are moving to is a reality that most people are in a hybrid environment where they're running traffic over both they're fixed and mobile infrastructure they're running traffic across multiple cloud layers and what they need to be able to do is to ensure that is certain applications that have higher requirements or performance are consistently managed across both those networks and across multiple cloud fabrics and so the discussions right now of the next application or how do we basically tag and mark performance level packets to ensure the particular applications that run in both environments can maintain a high level of service that's consistent with what the performance is if it's an AI based driven application or capability oftentimes those have more stringent requirements of latency round trip performance if you're doing inference you need quicker response times and people want that performance and they're doing more of it so they just need more sheer capacity and that's part of what's driving the lift what I expect based on other conversations are going that are going on is we in fact will start to see more applications pop up that are even more demanding and when you start thinking about what happens in the robotics space what happens is more autonomy increases at the warehouse levels those things are going to drive another layer of requirements and performance and when that happens I believe there'll be probably another investment level that will be required it will be managed networks that will be necessary given the performance requirements that are essential to allowing that to happen and once you have that foundational infrastructure and it's that you know what I would call fiber fed infrastructure that has the ability to track packets across both fixed and mobile and deliver a high quality service I think you're going to be in in really good shape I just might add for clarity the reference I made to some of the work that we're doing with the hyperscalers where that fits into this picture is as you know we've invested happily at the edge in endpoints both in our wireless business and our fixed business we have a fantastic metro to metro infrastructure as you might imagine based on the nature of our network and how we operate what we want to make sure is that our backbone in and out of those metros that hit those cloud fabrics we have absolute visibility on how we do that ingress and egress and so by involving ourselves with the hyperscalers that are driving most of the workloads in that space that makes sure that we have the right expressways or on ramps in and out of their clouds so that is our metro and our endpoint networks that we've built and invested in so heavily can have that end-to-end visibility and end-to-end performance and we want to do enough work in the long haul and in the data center to data center space and partner in the right ways where we ensure we have that right infrastructure in place and we're at the right point of presence to be able to offer that back to customers all right thanks for the questions mike operator we go to the next one the next question comes from david bardin with new street research please go ahead hey guys thank you so much and fiscal it's been a pleasure um and welcome to jennifer as well um so i i guess um john um i i agree with you i i think that you know the idea that you know space x and elon are going to invest a tremendous amount of resources to take a business that's very well functioning and and tear it down is it's probably the wrong way to think about you know the the ambitions and mobile which is to kind of create new connectivity opportunities and in in ai and robotics and cars and all these things and and so i think that maybe the market's getting that wrong but but i do think that there is this question about their ability to address the broadband industry um maybe at the value end of the market where fixed growth access has been so successful and how that presence might alter your um thought process around fixed growth access its growth opportunity its role in nurturing how you build and bridge to the to the fiber business um if you can kind of elaborate a little bit on that that'd be great and then um test gal just quickly um you know we threw the word working capital around quite a bit in the prepared remarks it feels like the intention has been to reduce subsidies on handsets as a as a method of of growing the wireless business but you know as we reduce capex and in fiber through efficiencies we're reinvesting it in in a combination of working capital interest expense could you elaborate a little bit on on how this working capital investment is is allocated to to building the business thank you so uh Dave good morning i would i would tell you this the most durable customer combination in our industry is a fiber fed broadband customer with a great wireless service on top of it bar nut it's going to be the most sustainable longest lifetime value in my view when i talk about service revenue share leadership in the industry the math and the calculation on the footprint that we're building for fiber and how we think about expansion in our partnerships is all driven on a foundation of how do we get enough footprint enough converged services in a way that that puts us in a share leadership position for a consolidated service revenues moving forward and over the long haul you know whoever steps into my chair after me um that's in my view kind of the race you're running for and those are going to be the most durable customers whether they're consumers or businesses moving forward we have as we always have in this industry there's transition times of technology um you know that it's not to say that there wasn't money made off of digital subscriber lines and ADSL and other capabilities but they they're transiting they run their course if they're not the most sustainable technology and to your point um i think fixed wireless access as i said will have certain customer bases and applications that are going to make it a sustainable technology but there are going to be other ways that it's used and are being used today that ultimately it will be uh outstripped by investment and other and newer technologies um as i've said i think there's some i think lio constellations are fantastic for delivering bandwidth to rural areas and they may well be the most efficient and effective way to get bandwidth and the less densely populated areas moving forward whether there's a motivation to invest in fiber it's going to be really hard for people to beat the consolidated value proposition of fiber and wireless um especially as the technology matures and the service capabilities around it mature to allow less friction for a customer offer more effectiveness with it and make those products work even better together so um i think over time your your point is correct that there is going to probably be some kind of a you know peak and then a a downward trajectory of fixed wireless as those technologies and the better technology settle into places um but that's not inconsistent with the set of expectations that we've been building in this company and that we've used to drive our guidance to you over the long haul and it's not inconsistent with what i've articulated is this company's goal to be the service revenue leader in the industry uh as we exit this decade and uh Dave uh you are correct in saying that the level of promotions remains the same and the customer ultimately is going to bear the loss of higher device prices with that said uh there is a timing element so generally we pay for the devices within a relatively short term so think about phones tablets gateways we pay upfront and we collect over time typically the life of the customer therefore uh we are investing upfront and recovering it over time so that is the working capital uh drain that i described in my script also impacting uh caches the uh disposition of our mexico asset and as i mentioned in my comment higher cash interest principally related to rates thanks for the question Dave operator we go to the next one the next question comes from shawn diffley with morgan stanley please go ahead great thanks very much team and congrats to pascal in an awesome career uh two if i may the first on agentic and the second on capex and free cash flow outlook so jon just an overarching question on how you're thinking about the potential rise of a.i. agents like muse impacting the connectivity sector or not you know do you see this as a deflationary force in the industry and the catalyst for switching and then talk about the risk and opportunity that you see for atnt specifically and then on capex i think it came down by about a billion for 27 and 28 you kept the free cash flow guide the same i think you talked about improved efficiency on some of the fiber builds i think the mexico sale might be in there but anything else we should be thinking about on the capex and free cash flow swings uh good morning shawn so um look i think there's a lot that still is unpacked on you know what is technology in general agentic search agents etc going to do to everybody's funnel management um and i i don't pretend to know exactly how that's going to play out i will tell you we're spending a lot of effort and time on it and there's a many things we've been doing over the last several months and quarters to fine tune our strategies on how we make sure we stay relevant i would tell you um as different as it's going to be what i'm encouraged by is we seem to be doing just fine in making the adjustments we need to make because there's been quite a bit of change already and how consumers are searching and looking for information and what they're doing around it and i i think we're probably in the early innings of that but we're aware of it we're adjusting to it um i think at the end of the day what's really important is you have good products and those good products have the right reputation and right value in the market and then ultimately you will be successful as you move forward and when you're operating in a position where you're putting technology out this is the lowest marginal cost technology that performs better i think that puts us in a in a really good position to make sure we stay in that conversation moving forward um specifically to your question about muse and some of the other chatter that's going on right now what i would tell you is philosophically we believe the customer gets to make choices on what they do with their service that's always been our point of view we also believe customers need to dictate their path forward on things customers have been pretty clear with us over the past number of years about account security uh account management account control before agents ever showed up there's all kinds of scenarios that go on today in real life that cause people to have to be really specific on who the decision-making authority is on their account we run family plans that have many many people on them we have people whose life circumstances change where there's a responsible party and there's maybe a separation or marital discord that changes things the the notion of an account having an owner and a responsible party is not a new issue um as long as that responsible party is authorizing and and allowed to go out and and make a transaction and can confirm that in the way that we would normally confirm those things such as validating their identity and ensuring they're authorizing it um they should be able to do to their account whatever they want if it's their agent that decides something needs to change and they've authorized an agent to do transactions on their account and we can authorize that transaction in the same way we would normally confirm such as when there's a sim swap or a major change on an account today we use things like two-factor authentication to ensure that it's valid and confirm those same principles and practices will be in place moving forward with agents but the important thing is that the customer will control they'll say whether or not their account is authorized to be managed by an agent and then if there is a large transaction that takes place they'll need to be a validation and authentication of that to ensure that we're not doing something that encourages fraud or is inconsistent with what the account owner would want to do um over the long haul my point of view just like today is we want to make sure the customers feel like they're getting value for what they're buying we want to make sure they're right sized at what they need in their products and services we do that as a normal course of business when people come into our stores and talk about what their needs are when they're working with us online in our algorithmic approach I think agents are probably going to be another way for people to do that and and be able to get insight as to what works for them and I think go over the long haul but good products out there treat people well it'll be fine for our business and um you know we'll have a creation of new customers who find us who wouldn't have found us other ways and we'll have some customers who choose to be a little bit more efficient now they buy from us ask all of you want to touch you on the cashflow issue sure thing on CapEx here's the way to think about it uh this one excuse me overall uh CapEx we said it's going to be down about a billion dollars three to four hundred million of the hours of that is going to be uh Mexico wireless CapEx uh the balance is from the efficiencies I described in my uh uh in my comments think about this we have we've been doing this for a very long time and with that comes the advantage of scale and improve uh ability to get it done faster and cheaper we have long-term contracts with partners we've been doing business for a very long time all those things are allowing us to do uh to build a little bit more efficiently and effectively in terms of overall cashflow uh you know the pieces uh to think about are the absence of Mexico probably costs you four to five hundred million annually and beyond that uh with higher device costs uh upfront that we're paying for and collecting uh over time there will be a working capital investment that we have to make but that those are the piece parts along with the interest cost I think so the questions are on operator we'll go to the next one the next question comes from Craig Moffitt with Moffitt Nathanson please go ahead all right thank you um you talked about the uh the fiber led strategy um given the rise in interest rates you've seen some of the smaller independent fiber builders um starting to struggle uh for bright speed issuing a going concern uh warning and that sort of thing is there an opportunity for you to pick up attractively priced assets in a consolidation cycle given the uh the the rise in rates and what that does to the some of the smaller independence?

Good morning Craig um yeah there are some I think part of the reason why we're we're comfortable where we are in our investment levels is one of the trends that you cited which is um mistakenly some people went into this space thinking that they could build um little pockets of fiber in places and never get to scale in a metropolitan area and be successful and the reality is that's very hard to do and in some cases there's been maybe more concentrated builds with the business model on legacy services and other things hasn't been aggressively managed to come up with an overall profitable equation and so we see the same thing I think I'd answer it the same way I've answered it in the past you know tell me the price and I'll give you the answer to the question and um I think you've seen you know up to this point in time I've been willing to go and acquire footprint and do things when I feel like we're getting a price that's an appropriate price and um we think if if the infrastructure has been built in a way that's consistent with our standards in our practices that we can operate it effectively over the long haul and the price is right sure I'd be interested in picking up more footprint if it holds the my point of view of us getting scale in the right geography I don't want to just buy footprints for the sake of buying it I need to make sure it bridges to other parts of our network where we can have the kind of efficiencies and scale and advertising and the growth in our wireless business and all the things that we think kind of are the magic and the economics around that lumen clearly fit that bill across the footprint that we picked up in my point of view if other opportunities that were like that that were priced that way um showed up sure I'd look at them as options and possibilities for us uh right now I would say in some cases maybe there's expectations in that market that aren't consistent with what I just articulated all right thanks for the question Craig operator I think we have time for one more question the next question comes from Sam McHugh with BNP please go ahead good morning guys and congrats Pascal as well and welcome Jennifer I'm on the fiba output helpful color on the fourth quarter but 27 guidance to anticipate a similar decline in fiba outputs as we're seeing at the moment and then secondly on the wholesale fiba point John I think you raised this maybe a year or so ago first obviously you lose a bit of kind of wholesale I'm sorry cross-sell potential in wireless if you wholesale would you look for a reciprocal fiba access from others as a precondition of wholesaling fibre thanks the way to think about Q4 as I said I expect Q4 to be down year over year around the same rate as we saw in Q3 you know that would imply a slight amount of a sequential moderation overall the guides that we've given if you recall over three years period is to have most of the growth the vast majority of our growth is going to be driven by customer additions and not our group not pricing and that continues to be our expectation yeah so overall we continue to expect relatively state law over this period Sam on your question about wholesale your question and first you're thinking about it the right way which is wholesale doesn't mean you have to open it up to all counters wholesale could mean that you wholesale it to those that are more strategically positioned to help you in aggregate and an example of that would be potentially there's a wholesaler who wants to for example have an exclusive MD&L relationship with you or maybe there's a paired footprint somewhere else outside of existing fibre footprint that we have that we gain access to that we wouldn't have otherwise and also to your point and as I indicated in my comments you do this after you think you've run all the plays that are your highest value plays at retail so our goal is to do everything we can to pick up every high value customer we can to serve at retail and we're having great success doing that as you're seeing with the results that we've been sharing with you and we'll continue to run that play until we hit a place where we think we've topped out and I think what's important to understand is you know you don't have to make these decisions on a national basis these can be very geographically driven and I think is over time what we know and I think what the cable industry would show you is a lot of these decisions and a lot of your approaches to market are local and they have to be and really if you look at what we've recently done in reorganizing our business I don't know how many of you picked up on it we did a structural change in our consumer space in our go-to-market structure the whole reason we did it is a realization that we're at a place where not all markets are created equal there are differences in infrastructure there are difference in tactics that need to be used in particular geographies of the country depending on what your asset base the tactics you want to afford we needed to organize our business our management teams are incentives in a way that drove that and I think you're going to make those kind of decisions on a location by location and circumstance by circumstance basis all right thank you for the question operator that was our last one you can go ahead and close out the call thank you the conference has concluded thank you for attending today's presentation You may now disconnect.

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