AT&T grew its revenue by 2.9% year-over-year (YoY) for the first quarter of 2026, as the telecom operator continued to highlight its focus on growing out its fiber footprint.

The operator pointed to further fiber growth, as fiber passings surpassed 37 million at the end of the quarter, including the addition of four million new passings following AT&T's recently completed $5.75 billion acquisition of Lumen's mass-market fiber business.

AT&T CEO John Stankey previously upped the carrier's initial goal of reaching 50 million premises with fiber by 2029, with a new goal of 60 million premises reached by 2030.

According to Stankey, AT&T is on course to achieve this target.

"Today, we reach over 37 million customer locations with fiber, and we’re on track to reach 60 million-plus locations by the end of the decade," Stankey said on the company's earnings call. "As I discussed last quarter, when we complete our work at a fiber location, we believe we’re able to offer that customer access to the Internet on a lower marginal cost structure than any competitor."

Stankey expects AT&T's total fiber passings across the U.S. to reach 40 million by the end of this year, meeting a target Stankey set earlier this year.

Stankey anticipates the growth of AT&T's fiber footprint to center around the handling of its Lumen assets, noting that the aim is to "scale" this footprint. That acquisition included 1.1 million customers and the carrier now has more than 11 million fiber customers in total.

"We’re scaling Lumen. We said coming into the year that Lumen, early on, we’re going to have to invest significantly in order to stand up that organization in order to drive incremental fiber penetration into their footprint and to really set ourselves up," Stankey said. "That process began in earnest in Q1, will continue, but I expect every month that passes, the performance of the Lumen asset will continue to get better. We’re going to continue to see improvement in fiber net adds and converged relationships."

While the future is fiber, AT&T does still offer legacy copper services. However, as the carrier is pushing to phase its legacy offering out, this has led to a drop in revenue for AT&T's legacy segment revenues.

For Q1, legacy segment revenues were down 25.3% YoY, mainly due to lower demand for services as AT&T continues to decommission its copper-based network.

Despite the drop in legacy services revenue, AT&T's overall revenue grew by 2.9% for the quarter to $31.5 billion. AT&T said this increase was mainly because of its advanced connectivity, wireless, and fiber revenues, including two months of impact from the customers acquired from the Lumen transaction.

AT&T also noted that the company returned $4.3 billion to shareholders in the first quarter through dividends and share repurchases, and plans to return more than $45 billion to shareholders during through 2028 via dividends and share repurchases.

Wholesale satellite offering?

While AT&T has focused on building out its 5G mobile network and fiber footprint across the U.S., the carrier is also pushing to bolster satellite-to-device connectivity.

During the company's earnings call, Stankey ruled out the idea of offering mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) services to satellite partners when asked, but did note that AT&T would be open to working with more than one satellite operator.

The carrier is notably a strategic investor in AST SpaceMobile, as are other mobile operators, including Verizon and Vodafone.

"I think it's natural that we work with LEO (low-Earth orbit) providers that have the capabilities to solve that problem to integrate those offerings into our services. We have a great position with those customers," Stankey said. "And as you've heard me say, my ideal outcome for the satellite space is that there's more than one satellite constellation up there. And I've offered that at some point, I'd expect that there's probably at least three serving the United States with capable products and services. We're working with one closely right now to make sure that they get off the ground and they're viable. That's AST SpaceMobile."

Stankey named SpaceX and Amazon as other satellite operators that will compete in this market, while noting that a fourth contender is possible.

"My goal would be that I have a good, strong wholesale relationship, and it may not just be one of them, it may be with more than one of them," Stankey added.