On Wednesday, AT&T (NYSE:T) discussed first-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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Summary
AT&T reported strong financial performance in Q1 2026, with revenues up 2.9% year-over-year, driven by gains in fiber and fixed wireless Internet customers.
The company added 584,000 total fiber and fixed wireless advanced Internet customer net additions, marking the sixth consecutive quarter with over half a million net adds.
AT&T aims to grow its fiber reach to over 60 million locations by the end of the decade and is focusing on investment-led strategies in fiber and 5G.
The acquisition of Lumen assets added 1.1 million fiber customers and over 4 million fiber locations, with positive early integration indicators.
The company’s new OneConnect plan is part of a strategic shift to focus more on service rather than device subsidies, aiming to enhance customer loyalty.
AT&T continues to work on copper network retirement, with 30% of its wire centers on a shutdown schedule, aiming for significant cost savings and improved infrastructure.
The company maintains its full-year guidance for consolidated service revenue growth in the low single-digit range and adjusted EBITDA growth of 3-4%.
AT&T expects free cash flow of $18 billion plus for the full year and plans to return $45 billion plus to shareholders through 2028.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good morning and welcome to AT&T’s first 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. 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.
Brett Feldman (Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations)
Thank you and good morning. Welcome to our first quarter call. I’m Brett Feldman, Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations for AT&T. Joining me on the call today are John Stanke, our Chairman and CEO, and Pascal Desroche, our CFO. 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. I also want to note that the quiet period for FCC Spectrum Auction 113 is in effect. During this period. Applicants are required to avoid discussions of bids, bidding strategy and post auction market structure with other auction applicants. And finally, I want to note that the discussion of our operating results and outlook during this call will be on a continuing operations basis. With that, I’ll turn things over to John Stanke.
John Stanke (Chairman and CEO)
Thanks Brett and good morning everyone. I appreciate you joining us today. We executed well in the first quarter, delivering results that were consistent with the outlook we provided while implementing several key strategic initiatives. Last quarter we told you that we had positioned AT&T for improved growth with our investment led strategy in fiber and 5G and there’s clear evidence of this in our first quarter results. We reported 584,000 total fiber and fixed wireless advanced Internet customer Net additions. This is our best ever first quarter result in the sixth consecutive quarter with over half a million consumer and business net adds. We also continue to see accelerated pace of our customers purchasing their wireless and Internet connectivity. Together, 42% of our advanced home Internet customers also choose AT&T wireless. But when excluding the transaction with Lumen, this convergence rate approached 45% on an organic basis during the first quarter. This is more than a 3 percentage point increase compared to last year which is our fastest ever year over year Convergence Growth Rate these results are encouraging but not surprising. It is exactly what customers have told us they want. They’re increasingly choosing what we believe to be the best combined fixed and mobile Internet service in the market. When our customers choose AT&T for their wireless and Internet connectivity, they consistently express stronger brand love, higher Net promoter scores and ultimately stay with us longer. During our analyst and Investor Day in 2024, we shared a few data points highlighting the relative improvements that we see among our converged customers in key operating metrics such as customer lifetime values and churn. These benefits remain robust and we expect that as a greater portion of our customers purchase their wireless and Internet connectivity from AT&T, we’ll demonstrate improved trends in CHURN and additional improvement in account growth. During the first quarter we made further progress AT positioning AT&T as the preferred provider for connecting consumers and businesses to the Internet. We closed our transaction with Lumen ahead of schedule, adding 1.1 million fiber customers and over 4 million fiber locations. We’re pleased with the progress we’re making as we integrate these assets in several major metro areas and position the business for faster growth. Early indicators are positive. We now offer fiber services throughout our distribution channels in these areas, which has driven sales activity well above pre transaction trends. We’re executing the steps to scale, engineering, construction and service delivery in the acquired geographies and expect that as we move into the back half of the year we’ll achieve steady improvement in fiber and wireless customer growth in these areas. When we focus on customers needs and invest in the experience and products they want, we find success and in the first quarter we gave customers more reasons to choose AT&T. We expanded the AT&T guarantee to cover Internet error and launched a new flagship app to deliver a simple digital first experience to customers. We also launched AT&T1 Connect, which enables customers to easily connect all their eligible devices at home and on the go and eliminates the need to buy Internet access twice. We refreshed our unlimited you’d way plans to deliver more value. All these moves are based on a consistent set of principles that drive our approach to serving customers the way they want to be served with offers that deliver on simplicity, value and choice and converged connectivity. After years of industry leading investments in our fiber and wireless network, we believe that we have now established a structural advantage that others will not catch. We reach more than 90 million customer locations across the country with our advanced Internet services over either fiber or 5G. We believe this provides us with more scalable reach and converged connectivity than any of our peers, including a meaningful scale and performance advantage in fiber. This is an advantage we’re growing as we ramp our deployment at a faster pace than anyone else. Today we reach over 37 million customer locations with fiber and we’re on Track to reach 60 million plus locations by the end of the decade. As I discussed last quarter, when we complete our work at a fiber location, we believe we’re able to offer that customer access to the Internet on a lower marginal cost structure than any competitor with superior performance and an industry leading experience on America’s best and fastest home internet. This positions AT&T to compete on performance and value by putting our service at the center of our converged offers and shifting the focus away from expensive device subsidies. You saw us lean into this advantage with the launch of AT&T1 Connect, the industry’s first ever single subscription service for fiber and wireless with a flat, flat monthly price. 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. Running these plays has not only strengthened our performance in the consumer market, but they’ve begun to demonstrate that the same strategy can strengthen our business enterprise operations. During the first quarter, Advanced connectivity business service revenues stabilized on a year over year basis for the first time ever. This reflects improved growth in fiber and 5G that is now offsetting declines in transitional services such as vpn. As we drive better sales execution across an expanding footprint of business locations that we can reach with fiber and fix wireless, we’re operating from a position of strength as we lean into the strategic foundation we’ve built. Our investments have positioned us to accelerate and scale the execution of our strategy in 2026 and through the course of the year. You can expect to see the momentum in our operating trends build as we continue our journey forward. Our strategies and capital allocation will remain focused on meeting the advanced connectivity needs of consum, consumers, businesses, the public sector and first responders as they adopt and rely on AI enabled tools and applications. We expect AI to fundamentally transform network requirements beyond download speeds to the ability to support symmetrical capacity, ultra low latency and session control across multiple access technologies under sustained load. And that’s how we’re architecting our converged network. We’ve committed to greater investment than any of our peers in the US connectivity infrastructure and by the end of this decade we expect to operate the most advanced and open communications network in the US built on a foundation of dense Metro fiber and deep nationwide spectrum. With the opportunity to reach more end users in our competition, coupled with our historically scaled Metro and long haul core, AT&T is well positioned to lead our industry in AI ready connectivity. Investment in high performing networking is a critical component of a competitive American AI ecosystem. We continue to appreciate the leadership of FCC Chairman Carr and the Commission’s continued efforts to modernize America’s networks. What we see transpiring on the federal policy front are the absolute right moves for the US to sustain leadership in communications infrastructure at this seminal moment in the birth of the AI economy. I reflect on this moment within the context of @&t’s milestone celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first phone call. For a century and a half we’ve adjusted to shifts in markets, technology and the evolution of public policy. It’s a story of many chapters over 150 years shared by proud and dedicated AT&T employees and retirees consistently rising to our long standing call of the spirit of service. While all the chapters are important, some turn out to be more consequential than others and I believe we’re entering one of those chapters that will be exactly that. I couldn’t be more optimistic given how this company has positioned itself as we enter this defining moment that our best days are ahead of us. With that, I’ll turn it over to Pascal.
Pascal Desroche (Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you John and good morning everyone. At a consolidated level, total revenues were up 2.9% year over year in the first quarter and service revenues were up 1.4%. Our growth is increasingly driven by gains in fiber and fixed wireless Internet customers as well as our success at growing customer accounts that choose AT&T for both Internet and wireless connectivity. We continue to expect we will grow consolidated service revenues and in the low single digit range for the full year, driven by growth in wireless service, fiber and fixed wireless revenues, partially offset by declines in transitional and legacy revenues. Adjusted EBITDA was up 2.3% year over year in the first quarter and adjusted EBITDA margin decreased 30 basis points to 37.4%. As a reminder, our first quarter 2025 results included a benefit to adjust EBITDA of approximately 100 million related to the resolution of vendor settlements. During the first quarter, we made good progress executing against our ongoing transformation initiatives as we work towards achieving our target of 4 billion in annual cost savings by the end of 2028. These include force optimization and vendor rationalization, efficiency gains from further AI enablement, accelerated digitalization efforts, and reductions to our legacy operations and support costs. We expect improved growth in adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter as comparisons normalize, service revenue growth improves and as we implement further cost actions and we continue to expect consolidated adjusted EBITDA growth in the 3 to 4% range for the full year. Free cash flow was $2.5 billion, which is at the high end of the 2 to $2.5 billion outlook we provided in January. Free cash flow declined by roughly $600 million compared to last year, which was driven primarily by higher capital investment of 5.1 billion. As we accelerate the pace of our fiber deployment for the second quarter, we expect free cash flow in the range of4.4 billion to 4.5 billion and we continue to expect $18 billion plus of free cash flows for the full year. Adjusted EPS of $0.57 in the first quarter was up nearly 12% and we continue to expect full year adjusted EPS to be in the $2.25 to $2.35 range. Under our new segment reporting, over 90% of our consolidated revenue and nearly all of our adjusted EBITDA is generated by our advanced connectiv. We believe this new reporting format improves transparency into the growth we are achieving from our investments in fiber and 5G as well as our progress at powering down our legacy copper network. Focusing first on advanced connectivity Service revenues were up 3.6% compared to a year ago. Wireless service revenues grew 1.7% year over year, which is consistent with our guidance that growth in the first quarter would be below the run rate we expect for the full year. Our wireless service revenue growth was primarily driven by growth in our customer base, including 294,000 postpaid phone net adds in the first quarter. Postpaid phone ARPU was flat versus a year ago. This is consistent with the outlook we provided for relatively stable ARPU as we gained customers in underpenetrated categories such as the value segment and grow our base of converged accounts that receive discounts but typically stay with us longer. We expect second quarter year over year wireless service revenue growth to improve from growth reported in the first quarter and maintain our full year outlook for growth in the 2% to 3% range. This is driven by our outlook for customer gains from our new unlimited and converged subscription plans and our expanding opportunity to sell wireless and home Internet services together. It also reflects our recent pricing actions that take effect during the second quarter. Advanced home Internet service revenues grew 27.3% year over year. This includes two months of revenues from fiber customers in geographies we acquired from lumen, which added about 650 basis points to our reported growth rate in the quarter. Similar to wireless, our organic growth in advanced home Internet service revenue was primarily driven by growth in our customer base. Advanced Home Internet Net adds were 512,000, which does not include the 1.1 million customers we acquired from Blumen in early February. This was our best ever first quarter and included 273,000 Fibernet ads and 239,000 Internet Air Net ads. We continue to expect that our fiber reach will grow by about8.8 million locations in 2026, including over 4 million locations we acquired from Lumen. As we ramp our fiber reach, we expect to see improved trends in our fibernet ads over the course of the year while still considering typical seasonality. We are also seeing strong growth in our business fiber and Advanced connectivity service revenues which include business fixed, wireless and value added services. In the quarter These revenues grew 7.2% year over year, which is consistent with the trend last quarter and improved from mid single digit growth a year ago. As John noted, total Advanced connectivity business service revenues were essentially flat year over year for the first time ever. Based on our improved sales, execution and expanding fiber reach, we expect total business service revenues within advanced connectivity segment to remain stable in the near term and continue to grow at a low single digit CAGR. Through 2028, advanced connectivity EBITDA grew 5.6% year over year and we improved EBITDA margin by 30 basis points despite a few notable headwinds. These include high single digit growth in low margin equipment revenues as well as the inclusion of revenues in geographies acquired from Lumen which which did not make a material contribution to EBITDA in the quarter. In addition, about 40% of the adjusted EBITDA benefit from the vendor settlements we called out in the first quarter of 2025 was incurred in the Advanced connectivity segment, so the improvement in Advanced connectivity EBITDA margin was driven by service revenue growth as well as the durable benefit of cost actions that I discussed earlier. Our outlook continues to anticipate an immaterial EBITDA contribution this year from the operating regions acquired from Lumen. This reflects increased spending within these geographies to stand up a business that is positioned for faster growth in fiber and wireless customers as fiber deployment accelerates and as we leverage our existing distribution in these regions. We’re really pleased with how the business is positioned coming out of the first quarter and continue to expect advanced connectivity service revenues to grow 5% plus this year with EBITDA growth of 6% plus. Legacy service revenues declined about 25% year over year, which is consistent with our outlook for 20% plus decline in 2026. We stopped taking new orders for legacy services last year in most of our wireline footprint, and we now have approval to discontinue legacy services in more than 30% of our wire centers. We’re actively working with customers in these areas and helping them upgrade to more advanced services like Internet, air and phone advanced. There is a lag between when customers migrate to more advanced services and when we are able …
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