AT&T Beats on Fiber, Fixed Wireless Additions
The carrier expects its $23 billion EchoStar spectrum deal to close this month and is still not interested in a SpaceX MVNO
WASHINGTON, July 22, 2026 – AT&T added 367,000 fiber subscribers and 279,000 fixed wireless subscribers in the second quarter of 2026.
Those both beat analyst expectations, especially the fiber additions. It was the company’s best second quarter results for fiber net adds, and best ever for combined fiber and fixed wireless net adds, AT&T CEO John Stankey said on the company’s earnings call.
The carrier now counts more than 12.8 million fiber subscribers and more than 2.6 million fixed wireless connections; those both include business and consumer subscribers.
The carrier is still on pace to expand its fiber footprint by 8 million locations this year, Stankey said, notching another 1.1 million in the quarter to bring the total to 38.6 million.
Postpaid phone net adds also exceeded expectations at 432,000. That’s helping the carrier increase its share of customers who bundle fixed and mobile broadband, which is AT&T’s strategy for keeping customers around longer.
Of the company’s fiber and fixed wireless customers, more than 42 percent of them also take a mobile line, Stankey said. That’s 45 percent when excluding 4 million recently acquired fiber locations from Lumen.
AT&T’s mobile churn was down sequentially and year-over-year, despite price hikes that went into effect in April. Both postpaid and prepaid average revenue per user (ARPU) exceed expectations.
Stankey said using customer data to target ads and offers and lower rates of device upgrades helped with mobile churn.
Fiber ARPU of $72.29 was also down both sequentially and year-over-year, and below Wall Street estimates. Stankey said the carrier was focused on boosting bundled customers, and in cases that has meant offering discounted broadband to a wireless customer.
“The fiber ARPU decline will also be seen as a slight negative for the Cable industry as there is a fear among investors that broadband ARPU growth is slowing for the industry and the days of 3-4 percent ARPU growth are behind us, which is probably true,” New Street Research analyst David Barden wrote in an investor note. “The ARPU growth was almost surely impacted by inclusion of Lumen and most of the street (including us) haven’t factored that adequately in estimates.”
Outgoing AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said lower-ARPU Lumen customers did drag the metric. MoffettNathanson founder Craig Moffett wrote in an investor note that fiber ARPU would still have seen “a substantial deceleration of where growth stood a year or so ago.
Moffett said AT&T’s argument for converged fixed and mobile customers was persuasive, given how much more likely fiber subs are to take a mobile line. But the discounts those bundles entail, he cautioned, are pushing down ARPU, and satellite broadband is becoming a competitor in more rural areas where new builds are happening.
The carrier brought in more than $31.5 billion in revenue and nearly $4.7 billion in free cash flow.
Spectrum, fixed wireless
Desroches said the company expects its $23 billion acquisition of EchoStar spectrum will close by the end of the month.
The deal, which received regulatory approval in May, has taken longer than expected to close. A judge recently approved the Justice Department’s request to relieve EchoStar of its obligation to operate a wireless network, a relic of the T-Mobile-Sprint merger, which some investors think will ease the process.
AT&T will acquire 3.45 GigaHertz (GHz), which it has already been using through a lease agreement, and 600 MHz licenses under the deal. That will provide more headroom for the company’s fixed wireless service, but Stankey said he still much prefers fiber for home broadband.
“I’m never going to sit here and tell you that the way I want to serve fixed traffic is by buying more spectrum and building more wireless infrastructure,” he said.
Satellite competition
Stankey was asked about competition from direct-to-device satellite operators, something that’s been on investors’ minds after SpaceX said it wanted to rival terrestrial service quality in its IPO filings.
He maintained his position that he thought direct-to-device would complement rather than compete with terrestrial mobile service.
He also reiterated AT&T was not interested in a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) deal that would allow SpaceX to sell service provided with AT&T’s network. Moffett has pegged an MVNO as SpaceX’s best chance of actually competing for a large number of wireless subs, but he's also noted the carriers would be reluctant to offer one for precisely that reason.
Stankey said the carrier could handle “98 plus percent” of a given customer’s traffic requests, meaning they were only out of reach of the company’s network 2 percent of the time.
“I’m not prone to look for a wholesale agreement to go solve a problem I don’t have,” he said. “I am prone to look for a partnership to solve the 2 percent.”
AT&T has partnered with AST SpaceMobile on that front. Stankey said that direct-to-device service would get off the ground in 2027.
AST is behind schedule on its satellite launches, and won’t have its planned 45 satellites in orbit until next year.
Copper retirement
Stankey said the company had FCC approval to discontinue legacy services at more than 30 percent of all its copper wire centers, which would become effective in late 2026. The company expects “a couple hundred” of those wire centers to be serving zero customers at that time.
The company has approval to stop selling legacy services to new customers at more than 85 percent of its wire centers. AT&T and other ISPs are eager to decommission that infrastructure, as it’s costly to maintain and doesn’t provide competitive broadband service.
AT&T is planning to have most of its copper retired by the end of 2029. California is a sticking point, as it has more exacting standards for ensuring rural areas have a full replacement for their landline.
The company is asking the FCC, which wants to spur copper retirement, to preempt California’s rules. The federal agency has already approved AT&T to discontinue service at 60 percent of its California wire centers.
