T-Mobile at Wells Fargo Summit: Growth and Strategic Insights

On Tuesday, 18 November 2025, T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS) took center stage at Wells Fargo's 9th Annual TMT Summit. The conference highlighted T-Mobile's strategic focus on network leadership, digital customer experiences, and broadband success. While T-Mobile faces competitive pressures from Verizon and AT&T, the company remains confident in its growth trajectory, emphasizing both strengths and challenges in its strategic outlook.

Key Takeaways

• T-Mobile aims to extend its network leadership and enhance customer experience through digitalization, particularly with its T-Life app.
• The company revised its post-paid phone net additions guidance to 3.3 million for the year.
• T-Mobile's fixed wireless service is gaining traction, with aspirations to reach 12 million customers by 2028.
• The integration of UScellular is progressing, with significant spectrum acquisitions enhancing coverage.
• Srini Gopalan has been appointed as CEO, focusing on network leadership, customer experience, and broadband success.

Financial Results

• Guidance: T-Mobile revised its guidance for post-paid phone net additions to 3.3 million for the year.
• Fixed Wireless: In Q3, T-Mobile added over 500,000 fixed wireless customers, totaling 560,000 when including fiber.
• US Cellular Integration: The acquisition included 47 MHz of spectrum across 37 million pops. The CapEx forecast for 2025 is between $9.5 billion and $10 billion, influenced by the integration, with expectations to normalize post-2026.

Operational Updates

• CEO Transition: Srini Gopalan has taken over as CEO, emphasizing network leadership, digital customer experience, and broadband success.
• Promotional Activity: The "Four for $100" offer accounts for a low single-digit percentage of gross account additions, with most customers opting for premium plans.
• Competitive Environment: No significant changes observed in competitor behavior following a CEO change at a rival company.
• Fixed Wireless: T-Mobile is capturing a disproportionate share from cable providers, with 70% of business from top 100 markets and 30% from rural areas.

Future Outlook

• Post-paid Phone Growth: T-Mobile remains confident in market robustness and expects strong switching momentum.
• Rural Expansion: The company aims to be a market leader in rural America, exceeding current expectations.
• UScellular Integration: Customer migration from UScellular to T-Mobile's environment is expected to accelerate in 2026.
• T-Life App: With 85 million downloads and over 20 million monthly active users, the app is central to T-Mobile's strategy to reduce store count and customer care calls.

Q&A Highlights

• Network Leadership: T-Mobile sees an opportunity to attract customers seeking better network performance, particularly from AT&T and Verizon.
• Satellite Connectivity: T-Satellite complements the terrestrial network, offering additional benefits to Magenta Status customers.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to review the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - Wells Fargo's 9th Annual TMT Summit:

Eric, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: All right, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit. Really pleased this afternoon to be closing out the day with John Freier, the President of the Consumer Group at T-Mobile. Thanks for joining us.

John Freier, President of the Consumer Group, T-Mobile: Yeah, thank you, Eric. Appreciate it.

I know you have a brief safe harbor.

I.

I wanna get that out of the way.

I do. If we can move to the safe harbor slide here, which is, basically, please look at all of this information. If you have any other questions, please go to our website at investorrelations.t-mobile.com.

Great. Maybe we'll start out high level with the recent CEO transition, you know, the recent change in CEO to Srini Gopalan. You've obviously had some very strong, you know, charismatic leaders in the past at T-Mobile. How should we think about the path forward for the end carrier under Srini, how that might differ from some of the previous CEOs that we've seen in the public market?

I think Srini's very charismatic as well. If I could just say that upfront, yeah, this is something that we've been excited about with Srini being appointed as CEO. You know, we've been working with Srini for a very long time, you know, really kind of the last 10 years where he's had a position as a TMUS board member for the majority of the last 10 years and has been with us and working with us kinda every step of the way relative to our strategy. And he's pretty clear-eyed about the priorities that he has for the company.

I would just say, you know, really, when you look at the three priorities he has, one is, how do we extend our network leadership position, attract more network seekers, and close this perception gap between reality and what prospects think of our network, number one. Number two is, how do we drive the customer experience and elevate that through digitalization? Then number three, how do we make broadband incredibly successful? Those are the three priorities that he laid out during our Q3 earnings call at the end of October. You know, for us, we were very clear-eyed about those priorities. We want to continue to drive growth in a very profitable, durable, accretive way. That is something that we have been known for as driving lots of outsized growth over the last 13 years as the end carrier, but also driving outsized financial performance along the way.

He is very clear-eyed about that, and it is something that we have been excited about. It is not one of these moments where you have, you know, a crisis. You know, he is stepping in in a moment of incredible success. I love the way that Mike Sievert, you know, kinda characterized this. When you have incredible success, the future has never been brighter, and the right leader is here, ready to go. That is the moment when you make these transitions. He has done incredible the last few weeks as he stepped into the role, but that should not surprise anybody because we have been working with him for the last decade or so.

Yep. Fair enough. Fair enough. Given that we're kind of in the heart of Q4, we're, you know, nearing a very promotional time period. We've got Black Friday coming up. We've got holiday promotions. There have been, you know, new phone launches in the market a couple months ago, and you've had some recent offers in the market, like four for $100 with no trade-in requirements. Maybe you could just kinda characterize how this Q4 is stacking up from a promotional standpoint, from an activity standpoint versus previous fourth quarters, realizing that, of course, there's still a lot of activity to come in the last, you know, month and a half of the year.

Yeah. This is my 32nd Q4 in this business, if you can believe that. I know that's what you're thinking, that there's no way this guy can be that old, but it's true. It is my 32nd quarter in this business. It's always, it's always, you know, kind of a competitive time, as you would expect during the holiday time period. A lot of headline offers that are out there, much like our offer of, you know, in terms of a headline offer for four for $100. You know, this is an offer that we've had that we've pulsed in and out of the market, you know, really for the last 10 years or so. There's just always a lot of noise.

For us, what we try to do is we try to have these big headline offers generate interest, generate traffic, and then really showcase to customers everything that we have to offer. When you think about four for $100, when we had these promotions in the market in the past, they've always represented kind of a low single digit of gross account additions in terms of the mix of that offer. The overwhelming majority of the customers that are, you know, coming into the franchise, you know, are selecting premium plans.

Mm-hmm.

When I look at the overall competitiveness, there's nothing that I'm concerned about. It's vibrant. The competitive environment's always vibrant in this space. There's nothing that I'm concerned about in terms of what I'm seeing today, and nothing that I would be concerned about in terms of what I'm seeing in the future for the balance of the quarter. Our momentum is continuing into this business. You know, we had, we revised our post-paid phone net guide to 3.3 million for the year. You can do the math between where we are, the guide, that kind of implies what you should expect in Q4. We're feeling really good about that momentum, the overall switching dynamic that's happening in the marketplace, and our ability to compete very effectively.

Like I said just a few moments ago, thoughtfully, profitably, and doing so that's rewarding customers for the value proposition that we offer.

Obviously, there's been a lot of news and chatter in the hallways around the CEO change at one of your large competitors recently, and they've expressed a desire to at least improve their customer growth through some retention efforts to try to keep more of their customers that have churned off. I, you know, early days, I realize, with the CEO change there, but any changes in behavior, marketing, retention offers that you've seen or expect?

Mm-hmm.

When competing against them?

Yeah. Like you said, they've gone through some changes over there. And, you know, so far, I haven't seen anything that is manifesting itself in the marketplace. I know they've had their public commentary, and I'm not here to do their investor relations for them, nor do I, you know, want to run their company. I tell you that if you just kinda step back for a second and just look at kinda net ads on a per-network basis versus a per-brand basis. If you look at it on a per-brand basis, sure, lots of challenges for the Verizon brand. If you look at it on a per-network basis between the AT&T network, the T-Mobile network, and the Verizon network, actually, that's quite healthy for them.

The big challenge and the big opportunity that I think they have is how to get their mix right between the net ads that are hitting their network.

Mm-hmm.

Should they have much more of a retail relationship with customers versus a wholesale relationship with customers? That is for them to decide. If it were me, just kinda looking at it, between the net ad composition, again, on a per-network basis, it seems like they have some clear opportunities to, you know, right-size, you know, what they are seeing coming through the Verizon brand in that space.

Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. I guess we'll all be waiting to see how they sound in February. As we think about upgrade rates this year, they've picked up quite a bit. We've seen industry churn pick up, a lot of customers that came out of two- or three-year device payment plans. So maybe you could talk about, from T-Mobile's perspective, do you prefer this kinda higher switching environment, more, you know, jump balls to go prosecute against, or do you prefer an environment in which, you know, switching activity's a little lower, like we've had the past few years? What do you think is kinda the best environment for T-Mobile to win share in, or both, you know, environments in which you can do really well?

Yeah. What you're seeing is, you are seeing more switching and more upgrade activity that's happening in the marketplace. I think that's not a new dynamic, but more of a normalization of where it was.

Mm-hmm.

Remember, there was, you know, two of our competitors had, you know, introduced financing constructs over 36 months. That probably artificially suppressed some of the upgrade activity, some of the switching activity in the marketplace. What you're seeing is more of a return to a normalization in terms of upgrades, in terms of switching, etc. I think that's a very healthy dynamic. We've demonstrated that we can play in either environment, that we can play in a lower switching, lower upgrade environment. We can play in that environment and have done that quite successfully. Or we can play in an environment where there's elevated switching. For me personally, the more jump balls that we have and the more switching and activity in the marketplace, that's great. I mean, we're a share taker in this overall space.

When you have more opportunity to take share, that's what we wanna be able to do. You know, our upgrade rate, as you've seen, has changed a little bit, but our overall post-paid phone churn is now the lowest in the industry. You know, in Q3, we reported the lowest post-paid phone churn in the industry. How everything's working out relative to switching, upgrades, that whole dynamic, it really bodes well for our ability to continue to resonate in the marketplace and to deliver great results for our shareholders.

This question you've probably gotten in many different forms over the last couple years, but it's really around kinda fiber and mobile convergence, which has obviously been talked about quite a lot at your two competitors. You know, with the construct that, you know, a bundled fiber and mobile solution will help lower churn. It will help extend customer lifetime value. Of course, it also comes at the expense of, you know, an upfront cost benefit that the customer gets. You know, it doesn't appear that you really have the aspiration to be a more meaningful fiber provider above and beyond the 12-15 million homes that you laid out. I know today you claim you really don't see it as a competitive disadvantage.

I think people are trying to project into the future five years when another 40 or 50 million homes of fiber get built. Does it ever become one? What's your best view today, and how do you prepare for the possibility that it could create, you know, lower switching in some markets where you compete against fiber?

Yeah. We just love where we are in this space. First of all, let me kinda back up for a second and just talk about our, you know, broadband position. You know, we're now the fifth largest internet service provider in the country. We have nearly 9 million overall broadband customers in the market. When you look at where we are on fixed wireless, and, you know, we've said, "Hey, we'll be at 12 million by the end of 2028." That's our number. We haven't deviated from that since our capital markets day in 2024. When you think about that 12 million in the context of households passed at a, like, basically a 40% penetration, it's kinda like 30 million households.

Mm-hmm.

If you think about that as households passed. Then, in addition to what you just said, between the Lumos and the Metronet transactions, ultimately having 12-15 million households passed, we're kind of in this 40-45 million household pass zone, in terms of the equivalent. We love that place. It's in a good place. We're not thinking about broadband from a position of defense. We really like our position here. We don't see anything that we need to be doing to bat back so-called convergence. Nothing that we need to do around that. We see an opportunity to make money. Obviously, our 5G broadband product is off of a fallow capacity model. We've been very consistent in terms of how that works, and we see an opportunity to monetize that fallow capacity in the network.

Fiber, we see an opportunity to make money and to go build kinda first-to-fiber or nearly first-to-fiber markets. All that's going incredibly well. We continue to not see, and we've been consistent about this since, you know, we started talking about this more openly at the capital markets day in September of last year, not really a whole lot of correlation on fiber footprints, penetration, you know, those kinds of things. We're just not seeing that. The reason is, and it's our experience, is that mobile is such a considered purchase. People don't say, "Hey, as a result of my broadband provider, I need to go exclusively with, you know, that same company for my mobile services.

Mm-hmm.

People do not really think about that. You know, gone are the days where, like, "Oh, if you bundled everything together, you only have to write one check versus three checks, and it is just easier." Everybody is on autopay. Like, that stuff does not really matter anymore. Sure, there is a little bit of a discount for bundling. Yeah, sure, that is there. When people really think back or step back and think about the overall value proposition, and they really critically compare Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, we win in those decisions.

Mm-hmm.

Regardless of who your home broadband provider is. Is bundling a factor? You bet. Smartphones, tablets, watches, a fixed line product for your home broadband, a wireless product for your home broadband. Bundling certainly lowers churn, and there's definitely lower churn the more deeper a relationship is and the more bundled a relationship is. It's not causal in that you have a fiber relationship, and therefore you have outsized mobile performance. We're just not seeing that. We're not seeing anything that would suggest that that's gonna change anytime soon, if ever.

I think you've talked about in the past how we've, the majority of the industry has been converged for quite some time, like north of 80% of it.

Yeah.

For years.

Exactly. 85% of America can get, for the last five years, can get their, you know, broadband connection and their wireless connection from the same company.

Yeah.

You know, you've seen what you've seen. I would add that, you know, given that whole dynamic, and we've been consistently talking about that since September of last year, we are the company with the lowest, you know, post-paid phone churn rate. You know, our competitors are rising in their post-paid phone churn rate. The rhetoric and the reality are a bit disconnected.

Yep. Yep. Fair enough. Just to flip to fixed wireless while we're on the broadband topic, you have the, obviously, you have your aspirations to get to, you know, 12 million customers. Maybe you could talk a little bit about where you're winning share. You've put up really good numbers year to date. Could you talk about the geographic distribution between urban, suburban, and rural, and maybe how that's changed since you first launched this product a few years ago? When you look at who you're competing with, is this price still primarily coming at the expense of cable, or are you seeing some success going up against other technologies, whether that's DSL, fiber in some cases, satellite?

Yeah. We just absolutely love this product. And, you know, this is something that we started talking about in 2021, initially going from zero customers. And we said, "Hey, by the end of 2025, we think we'll be at 7-8 million." And then, of course, we updated that to 12 million by the end of 2028. This business is performing just beautifully. And what's happened over time is you would think that the performance, as you load more and more customers on, the performance would degrade, but just quite the opposite is happening.

Mm-hmm.

We're finding more and more opportunities to give customers a better experience, better speeds, overall reliability, and customers are just loving this product. The growth, as you said just a few moments ago, has continued to be outsized. We had another quarter in Q3 of north of 500,000 fixed wireless customers, 560,000 total when you include fiber, but north of 500,000 on just fixed wireless only. Net Promoter Scores continue to rise. What customers are getting for what they're paying continues to be great. It's just a beautiful business for us. We're not seeing really much change here in terms of the composition of where the business is happening. You know, roughly 70% is coming from kind of the top 100 markets, kinda urban, you know, suburban markets, and the other 30% coming from more rural areas. We're not really seeing that composition change much.

To your question, and where that's really kinda coming from has been disproportionately cable. You know, I tell you, our customers, they just love being able to get a great product that's got great utility, great speeds, and to be able to free themselves from cable and those higher prices and exploding bundles to be able to get something that's just as great that we have to offer. Man, people are loving it. You know, it's something that I continue to be excited about, particularly when you think about fiber. As fiber comes into markets where we also have FWA, you know, on a hex bin basis, on a per-sector basis, the more that we can get fiber kinda going, the more it opens up some potential capacity for fixed wireless in those markets as well.

Our teams are loving this product. Our customers are loving the product, and the results are, you know, really off the charts.

When you look at, I know you have a smaller fiber, T-Fiber, platform today, but when you look at the type of customers selecting fiber versus fixed wireless, is there a lot of overlap, or is it just kind of a different segmentation of the market?

I would say it's a different segmentation. We really see these products as complementary, and they don't really substitute one another. The more mainstream customer that's using 400, 500, 600 gigs per month, fixed wireless access, great for them.

Mm-hmm.

customers that are using terabytes, you know, one, two, three terabytes per month, you know, fiber's probably the right product for them. Where we can move customers into fiber in those particular areas to free up capacity, not to have a one-for-one replacement, but potentially to have two, three, four-to-one replacement, that's what we wanna be able to do.

Yep. Maybe just to switch to, like, the overall outlook for post-paid phone growth. This has been something that for the last few years, investors seemingly have been bracing for this big slowdown, which hasn't really come, or if it's been very moderate. And there have been worries about immigration, government cost-cutting, you know, free lines and prepaid to post-paid migrations, inflating numbers, and things of that sort. So maybe you could kinda give your view of how what the post-paid phone growth environment looks like, not just this year, but out the next couple of years. And obviously, as the big market share taker in the space, can you continue to succeed even if we do see, a slowing gross ad environment?

Yes, we can absolutely continue to succeed. If you step back for a second, it's really hard for us to, like, think about net ad growth at an industry level. You were kinda hitting that at just a little bit, which is, like, different companies report different metrics, and it's just kinda hard to get to because some companies have a first-line-free construct, which we do not. It's always just kinda hard to get to.

Mm-hmm.

We pay attention to it, but we do not obsess over it, and we do not try to predict it. What we do try to do is say, "Okay, here is where we think the market is going. Here is what our plan is, and how do we go and execute our plan and deliver for our shareholders relative to what we have said?" When you look at the overall market, I am still feeling great about the robustness of the market. Like I said earlier, switching and the momentum continues to be very, very strong. We love where that is. I do not see that changing anytime soon. A lot of questions have been around immigration and some of the changes of this administration's policy around immigration. We have not seen that, in terms of an impact. There might be other impacts with lower transactional prepaid brands.

We just have not seen that in our business at all. And so, you know, where we are, even if there is a change, and it's hard to know if there's gonna be a change or not. I just don't know. But even if there is, we feel just great about this overall proposition that we have around best value, best network, and the very best experience that's creating a great halo for our brand to be able to compete thoughtfully and profitably for high-value and accretive customers.

Yeah. And just touching on that best network concept, I mean, you were very vocal earlier this year that you're now finally getting recognized by third parties for actually having the best network. I think you've also stated in the past that there's sometimes a lagging kind of customer perception of who has the best network. Maybe you could talk about how you're getting that message out there, how much more room you have to run in terms of convincing the many subscribers who are not on T-Mobile that you truly have the best network. You know, how do you ensure that you remain the best network, especially with Verizon and AT&T in particular acquiring some Spectrum assets recently to try to bolster their mid-band holdings?

You know, how do you think about all of that and kind of maintaining or extending this leadership you have?

Yeah. This is why this is such an important topic, which is why I think it's one of Srini's top three priorities, which is really the first one, which is really making sure that we advance this network leadership position and get credit for the network realities that we have and to close this perception gap. As you guys have probably seen, we've had a lot more network brand advertised in the marketplace. We've got Billy Bob Thornton running around. I don't know who the other guy is, that's the other guy in the other commercial. I can't remember the other guy, but one of our competitors. I can't remember his name. Who was it? Luca? Oh, yeah. I just, it's been so long since I've seen that guy do any. Like, it's been a while.

I just could not remember who it was for a second. Billy Bob Thornton, the landman, is hot right now. We have got him out, and, you know, kind of talking about this network. I do not know if you guys have seen our latest spot, which is basically, "Hey, one of my friends said the T-Mobile network used to suck, and now it does not." What we are trying to do here is to really kind of acknowledge the reality. Everybody is shouting, "We got the best this. We got the most reliable that, and the fastest this." Everybody is shouting that. What we are trying to do is break through. First, we have been crowned as America's best overall network, which is an incredible achievement. We are trying to break through all that noise and tell people that years ago, you are right.

If you tried T-Mobile years and years ago, not so good. We had challenges. Definitely, you know, you better stay in the left lane of the interstate and not move into the right lane of the interstate. You might lose coverage. That kind of a problem.

Yeah.

If you haven't tried T-Mobile lately, then you just haven't tried T-Mobile because of all of the, you know, investment and the 5G, two and a half gigahertz of spectrum that we've deployed. It's just a completely different game. I've been a part of this business for, like I said, 32 years, way back, you know, T-Mobile, VoiceStream, Western Wireless. Did I ever think that we would arrive as having the best network? Like, man, I never thought we would arrive at that place some number of years ago. After we got, you know, the first 700 megahertz spectrum, the 600 megahertz from the incentive auction, plus the Sprint transaction with all the two and a half gigahertz, you started to believe that we can put all this together and create something incredibly special, which is what we've been able to do.

Now we're in the early innings of really getting credit for it. One of the big opportunities for us to continue to grow is to capture and send network seekers from leaving AT&T and Verizon and moving to T-Mobile. You know, AT&T and Verizon have more than 200 million customers. Seventy million of them chose AT&T or Verizon because they had the best network back then. Now we have the best network, and it's a huge opportunity for us to go in and convince those customers that we have the very best network. We won't promote our way there. Sure, there's gonna be promotions that are always in the marketplace, but this is about, you know, speaking to customers, being real truth tellers, resonating with customers locally where it matters, and talking to them in very plainspoken ways.

something that we're incredibly excited about, something that we're gonna, you're gonna continue to see more and more network-oriented advertising that continue to get that message out in the marketplace.

Yep. Yep. And related to that, I know years ago you talked about how you were significantly underpenetrated in smaller markets, not necessarily rural, but, you know, outside of kinda the top 50 or 100. And you recently closed on the UScellular transaction. That gives you a little bit more footprint there. Where are we in terms of your rural expansion, customer penetration, and distribution? And, you know, is there really any reason why longer term you shouldn't have kind of a market-leading position in rural America? I mean, not putting an exact timeline on it, but just based on all the dynamics you've, you've expressed.

That's our belief. Our belief is that we should be the market leader. Being the market leader is, that's no question in my mind. The question that's in my mind is, what is our fair share? Because being the market leader is the majority share, but the fair share is, that's up for interpretation. Is that just taking, you know, the three of us between AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile and Comcast and Charter and, you know, divvying it up, is that your fair share? Not really, because I'm actually inspired by, you know, our top 100 markets. I mean, we're sitting here in Los Angeles right now. Here in LA, we have a share of household position of north of 50%, BIVO, north of 50%. In New York City, we have a share of household north of 50%.

In our top 100 markets, where we're number one in share position, we're continuing to grow. Where we're number two and number three in share position, we're continuing to grow, as you would expect in number three. What people are really surprised about is that we continue to grow across that number one share of household position. If you can do 50% plus in part in two of the biggest markets in the country, then, you know, our fair share and our ability to, you know, attract customers in rural America, I mean, that's way beyond what people think. The question is, like, how long will it take you to get there? We're well on our way. I couldn't be more proud of, like, what we've done in smaller markets, rural areas.

When we started talking about this back in 2021, people thought we might be a little crazy because T-Mobile's a brand that resonates in the big markets, not necessarily rural America. Now that we're north of 20% share of household, beating our declared ambition before we folded in US Cellular, now we're just in a great position. To your point on US Cellular, we have a great, and we can talk about this more if you'd like, we have a great opportunity to accelerate this overall position in those markets. We got a lot of runway here to go. Fair share, the way I think about it is I think about the top 100 markets inspiring me to go even further in smaller markets and rural areas than you might normally, you know, logically think.

Yeah. And just touching on UScellular briefly, I mean, you closed on that August 1, so a few months under your belt. Maybe are there any opportunities within that footprint that we may not be aware of? And maybe just talk about the steps of the integration, making sure you get that right. It sounds like you're accelerating some of the synergy realization, the cost to achieve relative to your original plan. It seems like things are going well so far.

It's going incredibly well. This is something, to your point, we closed on that transaction on August 1, across the entire UScellular footprint, picked up 47 megahertz of spectrum across 37 million pops in the UScellular footprint. It's going incredibly well. Everything's right on track. We just recently stopped promoting the UScellular brand for new customer acquisition and have unified the entire operation behind the T-Mobile brand for new customer acquisition. Any kind of dollars that you spend on promoting UScellular are not the most efficient in the world. Now we've stopped that. We've integrated the network so that UScellular customers not only have their network that they're used to, but they can now touch thousands of T-Mobile sites in that UScellular footprint and beyond.

T-Mobile customers in that US Cellular footprint can now see the sites that we will retain. It is, you know, 2,000, maybe a little bit north of 2,000 sites that came from the US Cellular network that we will ultimately retain and fully integrate into the T-Mobile network. T-Mobile customers are seeing better coverage. US Cellular customers are seeing better coverage and overall performance. All of that is going incredibly well. You know, we have some one-time, you know, CapEx charges that, as you would expect, are relative to integration in 2025 and 2026. We have said that 2025 is kind of in this $9.5 billion-$10 billion range. 2026, probably more to $10 billion. I would not necessarily drag that. That is kind of a one-time artifact of this integration.

We'll get to, you know, more of a normalized kinda $9 billion-$10 billion range in overall CapEx after we get through this integration in 2025 and 2026. Everything is really on track. The next big thing that I think we'll be talking to our investors about is how the customer migration is going.

Mm-hmm.

Moving customers from the UScellular environment to the T-Mobile environment. We'll be starting that, you know, in a pretty big way in 2026.

Okay. That's helpful color. Thank you. We touched on this a little bit earlier, in one of the one-on-one meetings, but, you know, T-Life has been a big priority for you, important part of your customer experience, obviously helping improve customer experience, reduce customer inbound volumes, and obviously could help you manage your cost base over time, you know, whether that's through your partner stores or other distribution channels. Maybe you could just talk about where we are in terms of the T-Life evolution and what kind of the next step is to really, you know, help that drive customer experience, but also financial profitability for the company.

Yeah. If you have any conversation with anyone at T-Mobile about anything T-Mobile, T-Life is definitely gonna come up. We are all about T-Life. This is something that we started talking about in our Capital Markets Day last year and really this vision of being able to concentrate this fragmented app ecosystem into kind of a super app that we call T-Life and ultimately driving engagement, transactions, overall interactions as the source where everything around T-Life will connect into T-Life. Right now we've got 85 million downloads on T-Life, and we're regularly seeing north of 20 million monthly engaged customers. Twenty million accounts, or lines, I should say, actively engaging with T-Life on a monthly basis. It's really beautiful. We've got two-thirds of our overall upgrades that are happening now on the T-Life platform.

You know, basically digital upgrades a couple of years ago was like almost nothing. And now for that to be two-thirds really, really speaks to the power of the app. We're now kind of, when you look at iPhone pre-order back in late September, early October, three out of four upgrades that happened during that pre-order period came through T-Life. Hundreds of thousands of transactions, you know, a huge scaled, event. That is something that we continue to see a lot of demand for. You know, what we did with T-Life is we completely not even just re-engineered all of our customer journeys. We kinda basically threw them out and rebuilt them from hello. Like in the old app, in the old legacy app, it would take you 30-something taps to be able to do something, maybe. And that was a big maybe on that.

Within T-Life, now it's down to like 12 taps. Super easy, very fast, very efficient. What we wanted to be able to do is to take these kinds of transactions from them taking hours to them taking minutes. All of that's going incredibly well. Over time, you know, we see operating efficiency improvements here. You know, I was pretty clear at our Capital Markets Day that, you know, we'll have less stores over time. We'll have a higher mix of our stores being company-owned, retail, and operated. We wanna really control that experience, perfect that experience, make that experience great for our employees. Over time, I think we'll have less and less calls into our customer care environment. There's definitely operating efficiencies that will be coming through T-Life. There's no question about that.

What we wanted to do is to not think about T-Life through a cost transformation effort, but think about T-Life through an experience transformation effort that is operating efficiencies that will come over time.

All right. That's a very good overview. And maybe before we finish up, I wanted to ask you about satellite and direct-to-cell. That's been very topical recently. You have been a close partner with Starlink in direct-to-cell connectivity. Could you talk about how important that feature is to today's customers for edge connectivity and, you know, more remote markets? And then, not to make you predict on what Elon or SpaceX may or may not do, but they did recently acquire some Spectrum, and there's been a lot of, you know, conversation about whether that opens up additional wholesale opportunities longer term if they ever have aspirations to, you know, operate their own network through a terrestrial means.

Yeah. T-Satellite has been a great complement to our terrestrial network, and it's one of the many benefits that customers can get with Magenta Status. You know, there's so many benefits that, you know, between streaming and in-flight Wi-Fi, all kinds of benefits. Obviously, T-Satellite is one of those benefits as well. Like I said, it's a complement to the terrestrial network, particularly in the 500,000 sq mi that are distributed around the country that no terrestrial network can reach. I wouldn't say it's mainstream in that you would ever seem to me that you would never have connectivity around that as an always-on, evergreen option, but more as a complement to the terrestrial network. I kinda heard some of those things too on the in-vino relationships.

That might make a lot of sense for them. Sounds right to them to go pursue that. You know, I think this is a great complement and nice addition to some of those areas where you need coverage, need to be able to send a text, might need to be able to send a, you know, a place to call, maybe send a picture. It is beautiful for that. As a mainstream kind of replacement for wireless, I do not see that happening at all. Nice complement though to our overall business.

All right. Great. We're out of time. John, thank you for joining us today. Appreciate it. Thank you all for coming.

Thank you all. Appreciate it.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.