Fibre was top of mind for Verizon, T-Mobile US and AT&T executives during last week’s earnings calls as each of the big three claimed various levels of superiority, but only one has a clear edge.

According to Q2 earnings call transcripts, AT&T executives mentioned fibre 52 times, followed by T-Mobile with 23 and Verizon with 18.

All three of the operators are determined to win the US fibre war, but their approaches vary.

Convergence of fibre broadband and mobile services are also key going forward, especially to win or keep customers from migrating to cable operator’s mobile and broadband plans.

Verizon
Verizon has been a big advocate for fibre ever since the launch of Fios in 2004, which was followed by its One Fiber build in 2016. While Verizon doesn’t talk much about One Fiber anymore, building a single, unified fibre platform is the core of various consumer and business services.

CEO Hans Vestberg stated on the Q2 earnings call the operator is on track to deliver 650,000 incremental fibre passings this year, which is ahead of schedule.

Once its $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications closes in early 2026, Verizon plans to extend its fibre reach to a range of 35 million to 45 million locations over the coming years and exceed one million fibre passings each year after Frontier closes.

“We are looking forward to having Frontier’s assets serve as an important catalyst for our fibre expansion and broadband growth acceleration,” CFO Tony Skiadas said on the call.

T-Mobile
T-Mobile launched its T-Fiber service last month and closed its joint venture fibre deals with Metronet and Lumos.

“With both up and running under the T-Fiber banner in the second half, we’re poised to deliver 100,000 or more fibre nets on top of our planned 5G broadband nets this year,” CEO Mike Sievert stated. “We are off to the races.”

T-Mobile COO Srini Gopalan explained the operator is targeting 12 million to 15 million fibre locations through the Lumos and Metronet JVs along with open access partnerships.

“That’s before we go make other investments,” he stated. “As we’ve said before, we’re very open to looking at investments in fibre.”

Mike Katz, president of marketing, strategy and products, stated after several years of being in pilot mode with T-Fiber, it now has infrastructure in place from a go-to-market standpoint.

“We’ve been able to engineer an IT platform for T-Fiber that I think is just fantastically elegant because this will be a model that involves wholesale partners, JVs like Lumos and Metronet and possibly future JVs, all of whom can plug into a unified T-Fiber platform incredibly easily,” Katz explained

AT&T
AT&T CEO John Stankey has been bullish on the company’s fibre expansion for years and it is starting to reap the rewards.

The mobile operator expects to unlock $6.5 billion to $8 billion in cash tax savings through 2027 due to the passing of Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. It plans to invest $3.5 billion of those savings into building out its fibre network.

Stankey said on the earnings call the legislation will accelerate the company’s fibre buildout to a pace of more than four million homes per year, a run rate he expects to achieve by the end of 2026.

The mobile operator is targeting 60 million business and consumer fibre locations by 2030, which includes the addition of Lumen’s Technologies’ consumer fibre footprint, its Gigapower joint venture with private equity firm BlackRock Alternatives and four agreements with open-access providers.

“I think we’re going to see over time a combination of national players that need assets to do both fixed and mobile together,” Stankey said when asked about fibre competition. “If you’re kind of an island-based overbuilder, or you’re an open access provider that has a small footprint, it’s not a hospitable environment necessarily to be in when scale costs are important and distribution is important.”

“I expect in some cases, some of these overbuilders are not entirely well capitalised.”

And the winner is…
Dell’Oro Group’s Jeff Heynen, VP, broadband access and home networking, told Mobile World Live based on AT&T’s commitment to pass 60 million homes with fibre it holds the advantage.

“Fibre just has such a high barrier to entry,” he said. “But if you make the investment now, you have the first-mover advantage in most markets, as well as the opportunity to bundle services, just as AT&T is doing now.”

He noted AT&T reported four million of its customers buy both fibre and mobile phone services, which is 15 per cent of its post-paid mobile subscriber base.

“That four million subscriber number is up 16 per cent year-over-year,” he explained. “As AT&T passes more homes with fibre, you can assume similar growth rates over time, such that AT&T looks totally different by 2028 and certainly by 2030.”

Heynen stated T-Mobile has shown that it is not afraid to use M&A to expand its fibre footprint and he fully expects it “will continue to expand those relationships in order to take advantage of the opportunity to converge and offer bundled services.”

Converged services
Stankey is also a big proponent of converged mobile and broadband services as a difference maker for the operator.

“Our convergence trend accelerated in the second quarter, driven by growth in new customer relationships that subscribe to both our fibre and 5G services. As we’ve discussed in the past, our mobility share is higher in areas where we offer fibre,” he said.

Verizon CFO Tony Skiadas stated on the earnings call converged services of mobile and broadband will reduce mobility churn going forward.

CEO Hans Vestberg explained the company’s “ key differentiator is that we have owners’ economics on most mobility and broadband”.

“We have the biggest mobility base and we’re now adding to our fibre base with Frontier,” he stated. “We have a huge opportunity for convergence.”

MoffettNathanson senior MD Craig Moffett has maintained a bearish outlook for the operators’ convergence prospects.

He noted with Lumen and the Gigapower out-of-region deployments, AT&T will offer fibre “in significantly less than a third of the country” while cable companies such as Charter Communications and Comcast have bigger footprints.

“Even with Frontier, Verizon’s wired fibre footprint will cover less than one in five US households, so their convergence will depend on FWA, not fibre, in the vast majority of the country,” Moffett wrote.

Heynen said he is less dubious about the convergence play and sees it as a growing trend among all operators.

“Yes, cable has shown that mobile can be used to stem the losses of broadband subscribers. But they face the bigger challenge of competing against fibre which is perceived to be a more future-friendly technology,” he explained.