T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert (pictured) was adamant on the company’s Q2 earnings call there won’t be any additional fibre company purchases going forward, at least for the short term.

The operator paid $4.9 billion for a 50 per cent stake in US-based fibre service provider Metronet recently, which followed a $950 million deal to acquire a 50 per cent equity in Lumos Networks earlier in the year.

T-Mobile entered joint ventures in both of those transactions, which Sievert stated allowed it to make “capital light” investments in fibre.

During the call Q&A, the CEO pushed back on whether there was a bigger fibre strategy in play.

“Our appetite for further transactions in this space is limited,” Sievert said. “We really like the ones we’ve done. They give us a material footprint and we’re not currently working on something else like it. That being said, we’re open minded.”

T-Mobile’s strategy is to offer FWA in areas where it has excess capacity on its 5G network. It reported 406,000 new subscribers for its high-speed internet offerings, which comprises both FWA and fibre, with a third of those subscribers coming from cable operators.

Sievert noted the company has hundreds of thousands of people on its FWA waiting list, but T-Mobile won’t serve them if it doesn’t have enough network capacity.

Mike Katz, president of marketing, strategy, and products at T-Mobile, said in areas where the operator deploys fibre “there’s an opportunity for us to take some of the demand that we’re seeing in fixed wireless, where those excess capacity pockets don’t exist, and move them to fibre”.

Lumos will extend its fibre reach to 3.5 million homes by end 2028, while Metronet is targeting 6.5 million homes by the end of 2030.

“Now we have the beginnings of a critical mass in the space,” Sievert stated

Q2 numbers
T-Mobile added 532,000 post-paid customers, which executives stated is a record for Q2 additions. Those post-paid subscriber gains topped Verizon and AT&T’s Q2 post-paid additions.

The operator raised its forecast for mobile subscribers this year to between 5.4 million and 5.7 million, from a previous high of 5.6 million. Service revenue of $16.4 billion grew 4 per cent year-on-year.

T-Mobile posted revenue of $19.7 billion, up 1. 4 percent, while net income increased by 23.7 per cent to $2.9 billion.