AT&T moved deeper into Advanced Connectivity in Q1, unveiling new quarterly metrics designed to highlight the company’s success in convergence thanks to growth in fiber and fixed wireless.
Impact: AT&T ended the quarter with nearly 15 million Internet connections in the Advanced Connectivity segment, including 12.5 million fiber customers and more than 2.3 million Internet Air subscribers. Residential customers make up the vast majority of AT&T’s customer base in both technologies, including 11.8 million on the fiber side and more than 1.7 million Internet Air fixed wireless customers. The company turned in 584,000 Advanced Connectivity net adds in the quarter, split evenly between fiber and fixed wireless. Taking B2B out of the equation, that works out to 512,000 Advanced Connectivity home Internet adds, a figure that does not include customers added in AT&T’s transaction for Lumen’s Mass Markets fiber assets. AT&T reported 273,000 residential fiber net adds, up 4.6% year-over-year but down 3.5% sequentially, while residential Internet Air net adds increased 17.7% YOY and 8.1% sequentially to 239,000.
AT&T added roughly 700,000 new fiber passings in the quarter, which pushed the company’s owned-and-operated fiber passings to 32.7 million, up 10.8% from Q1 2025. With the addition of 4.8 million locations from Lumen, however, AT&T’s total fiber coverage now stands at 37.5 million locations. AT&T has already started on its plans for the Lumen territories now that it has closed that transaction (which also delivered 1.1 million fiber customers) ahead of schedule. That puts AT&T well on its way to adding 8 million total fiber passings to its footprint this year, including the Lumen locations. The company also said that it’s making progress on integrating the Lumen assets into its operations, with a particular focus right now on several unspecified major metro areas. Executives believe these markets will help position AT&T for faster growth because sales activity under AT&T is already higher than it was before the transaction closed. CFO Pascale Desroches said that AT&T expects fiber net adds to continue to improve as the company expands its footprint. AT&T’s plan to spin the Lumen fiber assets off into a separate entity through a partnership with an as-yet-unnamed equity investor appears on track to close sometime in the second half of the year.
Elsewhere, AT&T remains deeply committed to its convergence goals, with CEO John Stankey discussing the company’s new OneConnect bundles, which he described as a “platform” that AT&T wants to tailor to customers, thus driving retention and increasing customer lifetime value. The company reported nearly 5.7 million Advanced Home Internet connections with AT&T wireless, a new metric defined as an AT&T Fiber or AT&T Internet Air connection combined with primary wireless account holders who subscribe to consumer postpaid phone service, per a description in AT&T’s earnings materials. The percentage of Advanced Home Internet connections with AT&T wireless dropped six points from the end of 2025 to 42% in Q1 2026, though it’s up from 40.9% in the year-ago quarter. And Stankey said the company’s organic convergence rate approached 45% when excluding the Lumen markets, which would have been a greater than 3% YOY increase. AT&T also broke out its convergence metrics for fiber Internet, which came in at more than 4.7 million total connections, or 40.2% of the company’s fiber subscriber base.
But analysts continue to have questions about how AT&T will compete in convergence on a nationwide scale with a fiber footprint that by OTI’s count will ultimately cover around 45% of U.S. households once it reaches its goal of 60 million passings. Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson has repeatedly pointed out that AT&T’s fiber footprint will only cover about a third of the country upon completion and will face certain competition from cable operators with similar converged bundled offerings throughout that footprint. With fixed wireless and satellite Internet factored in, he thinks it will be difficult for AT&T to maintain its position with convergence, which he likes to call “an elevated name for ‘discounts.’” But analyst concerns have not fazed Stankey yet, and he doesn’t appear to have the same worries about his convergence strategy, instead focusing on the ways it’s driving growth for AT&T.
