Verizon and AT&T recently closed on multibillion-dollar fiber deals that set up what should be an interesting broadband fight in 2026.

Verizon’s $20 billion Frontier Communications deal closed last week, a deal that bolstered the carrier’s overall fiber footprint to more than 30 million locations and serving more than 10.5 million connections, and a footprint the carrier wants to expand.

CEO Dan Schulman during the carrier’s recent earnings call pointed to Verizon’s recent agreement with Tillman affiliate Eaton Fiber to expand fiber services outside of Verizon’s core markets and internal plans targeted at drastically expanding its overall fiber footprint over the next several years.

“We want to get to at least 40 million or 50 million fiber passings,” Schulman said. “We said in our capex guidance that we'll do at least 2 million organically,” numbers the executive later said he was “comfortable” with.

Schulman also hinted that Verizon’s balance sheet would allow for other potential deals.

“We'll look at a possibility of both inorganic and partnerships,” Schulman said. “That is something we're always looking at. We have plenty of capacity and flexibility on our balance sheet to do any one of those acquisitions and other things that we might consider.”

That balance sheet could also gain flexibility from Verizon’s broader cost-cutting efforts. These include thousands of more jobs being slashed over the next couple of months and Schulman’s warning that under-performing assets could be cut free.

“We're not going to invest in places where we're losing money right now,” Schulman said during the earnings call. “As I mentioned I think last quarter, we have a number of places where you add it all up, and we're losing $1 billion to $1.5 billion a year in margin. Like we are either going to sunset those, retire those, or divest those things, and there's no need for us to continually invest in places where we're just going to lose money forever on that.”

AT&T’s Lumen addition

Verizon’s increased broadband focus aligns with what has been a longer-standing push by rival AT&T, a push that this week received a boost from the closing of its $5.75 billion purchase of Lumen Technologies’ consumer fiber business.

AT&T CEO John Stankey told investors during the carrier’s most recent earnings call that it ended last year with a fiber network reaching 32 million locations, a number it expects to hit 40 million by the end of 2026.

“Beyond 2026, we plan to expand our fiber reach by approximately five million locations annually through the end of this decade,” Stankey added. “We expect this to drive rapid expansion of our opportunity to sell fiber and 5G together to both households and businesses at unmatched scale.”

AT&T is also starting to lean more heavily into wireless broadband opportunities, both with its 5G-based Internet Air fixed-wireless access (FWA) product and satellite-based options.

For FWA, AT&T recently moved on a spectrum deal with EchoStar that provides the carrier with extra capacity to serve more potential wireless broadband customers. Stankey explained that this will allow the carrier to quickly reach more areas where it does not currently offer fiber-based broadband services.

“Today, we're able to offer advanced Internet services over fiber or 5G to over 90 million customer locations across the country,” Stankey touted, later adding that this combination is providing a more compelling investment thesis.

“Part of the reason that we're so bullish on fiber and why we're investing the way we are is we are getting to a point where networks are densifying and the technology is getting a lot better at price points and how we radiate more deeply into networks and we get dynamics of how we offload as we pick up more combined customers, we have market share dynamics that play out,” Stankey said.

Stankey also noted that this expansion was not just a footprint play.

“We're acquiring a fiber network with only 25% customer penetration, well below AT&T fiber penetration of 40%,” Stankey said of the Lumen deal. “We estimate that fewer than 20% of these customers also subscribe to our wireless services. This is less than half of the convergence rate we've achieved in our current fiber footprint. We already have extensive wireless distribution in Lumen geographies and soon we'll have the network assets and deployment capabilities needed to offer customers a better choice for connectivity.”

How will T-Mobile US answer?

Verizon and AT&T’s recent additions now leave open the question of how rival T-Mobile US will respond.

The carrier’s current T-Mobile Fiber program is based on a pair of joint ventures: one with investment firm KKR controlling Metronet, and another with EQT Infrastructure controlling Lumos. Those two deals provide T-Mobile U.S. with a fiber network passing approximately 15 million locations.

T-Mobile US management has been modest about its initial fiber plans, with previous CEO Mike Sievert having told investors during the carrier’s second-quarter earnings call last year that it expected to add approximately 100,000 net new fiber connections by the end of 2025.

Despite those modest expectations, the carrier maintains a healthy view of its operations.

Jon Freier, president of T-Mobile US’ consumer group, touted the carrier’s broadband progress during the recent Wells Fargo TMT Summit. Freier noted the carrier counted nearly nine million overall broadband connections, making it the fifth-largest broadband provider in the U.S.

“And when you look at where we are on fixed-wireless, and we've said, ‘hey, we'll be at 12 million by the end of 2028.’ … And when you think about that 12 million in the context of households passed at like basically a 40% penetration, kind of like 30 million households, if you think about that as a households passed,” Freier said. “Then in addition to what you just said, between the Lumos and the Metronet transactions, ultimately having 12 million to 15 million households passed, we're kind of in this 40 million to 45-million household pass zone in terms of the equivalent.”

Freier added that this fiber angle allows “an opportunity to make money and to go build kind of first to fiber or nearly first to fiber markets.”

That expanding fiber footprint will become increasingly important toward that opportunity, especially as consumption continues to grow. Freier noted that T-Mobile US’ “mainstream” fixed-wireless access (FWA) customers are using up to 600 gigabytes per month of data, and FWA is “great for them.”

“Customers that are using terabytes; one, two, three terabytes per month, fiber is probably the right product for them,” Freier explained. “And 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 want to be able to do.”

Of course, those plans will now be under the purview of newly installed CEO Srini Gopalan, who tipped his leadership plans during the carrier’s most recent earnings call.

“We're really excited by the broadband opportunity. This plays to the heart of the un-carrier,” Gopalan said, referencing T-Mobile US’ legacy pitch as a carrier willing to shake up the market. “What we've got here is customers in a place where they have an inferior product, quite often, where they're paying a huge premium. It's classic un-carrier territory: going in and attacking incumbents who have not invested in their networks and who are charging a large premium for a product that isn't living up to expectations. Now we'll go after that with both FWA as well with as well as fiber. We see those as complementary, and the way we think about both those businesses is setting them up in a way that the economics allow us to pursue.”