T-Mobile US wants to reframe the current fiber-fueled push by rivals toward expanding their respective broadband footprints with a greater recognition of fixed-wireless access (FWA)-based coverage, a reframing T-Mobile US think AI and 6G will help bring into greater focus.

T-Mobile US CEO Srini Gopalan this week told an audience during the carrier’s combined fourth-quarter earnings call and investor day that T-Mobile US’ recently launched T-Fiber product is “tracking well on plan,” forecasting that the nascent offering will add up to four million customers by 2030. That will be on the back of the service passing up to 15 million locations by that time.

“And remember for us, this is all incremental,” Gopalan said. “None of this is an over build of copper and cannibalization. All of this is incremental revenue as incremental customer relationships that we can nurture. And the growth in this business and the upside still left in it is substantial.”

That forecast is the first provided by the carrier since launching T-Fiber last year, with initial estimates that the service would add around 100,000 new connections through the end of last year. That service is based on a pair of joint ventures: one with investment firm KKR controlling Metronet, and another with EQT Infrastructure controlling Lumos.

That forecast also comes under the shadow of more robust fiber expansion plans from rivals AT&T and Verizon.

AT&T recently closed on its $5.75 billion purchase of Lumen Technologies’ consumer fiber business, with plans to pass 40 million locations with fiber services by the end of this year. Verizon just closed on its $20 billion purchase of fiber provider Frontier Communications and is touting plans to reach 50 million locations within the next several years.

T-Mobile US’ plans remain more conservative.

“When you think about long term penetration … the thing you need to remember is we'll still be building … and so when if what you're looking at is what is cohort-level penetration, then it will be higher than that number you're looking at, purely because we'll still be building,” Gopalan explained.

The carrier is also taking that conservatism toward future fiber-focused acquisition opportunities.

“Are we open to looking at more assets,” Gopalan said in rephrasing a question. “Yes, at the right price, because we're not going to sit here with a gun to our head on, we're going to cover this many streets, forget customers, and then work back from that while people inflate their prices when they have a discussion with us. Are we open to more assets? Yes, they need to be at the right price.”

Gopalan instead pivoted toward T-Mobile US getting more attention for its FWA-based broadband opportunity. The carrier updated its FWA-growth guidance, stating that it expects to grow that business to 15 million connections by 2030.

“If you were to equate that to fiber homes passed, that's about 40 million already,” Gopalan said of that forecast growth, adding that in combination with its actual fiber expansion plans, “we're going to be in 50-plus million from a homes-passed count perspective, it's a count we think is actually precisely irrelevant, but if that's the count you want to do, that's the order of magnitude where we are.”

That combination could also help T-Mobile US expand its enterprise opportunities.

André Almeida, recently installed head of T-Mobile US’ broadband, enterprise, and emerging business, noted that the market was going through a connectivity transition that could open up greenfield opportunities for T-Mobile US.

“There's a big transition of technology happening in b2b from traditional connectivity based on Ethernet and MPLS toward much more of an underlay-overlay split, where you start seeing more traditional internet connections being the baseline of connectivity, and then being complemented with SD-WAN and SASE [secure access service edge] solutions,” Almedia said. “That's a huge opportunity because that allows us to get into that space without having to carry the legacy and the complexity of having to run complex support systems for customers.”

AI RAN and 6G opportunities

T-Mobile US’ broadband expansion could also get a boost from the carrier’s AI and 6G efforts, though the carrier is also keeping that opportunity close to the vest.

The carrier was one of the first to get behind coordinated AI RAN efforts when it launched a test facility in Washington. That location is focused on testing the use of AI to help control radio access network (RAN) functions, and includes partners like Nvidia, Ericsson, and Nokia, all of whom are part of the AI-RAN Alliance.

John Saw, president of technology at T-Mobile US, explained that these efforts have so far evolved to both vendor partners Ericsson and Nokia having successfully made voice calls over an Nvidia-powered AI platform, but that there are much broader opportunities to be had with “physical AI.”

“That's why we see the potential there,” Saw said. “If you talk about tokens, the basic compute unit for AI is tokens … and with generative AI, tokens are usually just information tokens. They can be processed in a few seconds. It basically gives you a good analytics of the world. But with physical AI, tokens are going to be moving, they're going to take action. we, coined it ‘kinetic tokens,’ tokens that move. When tokens move, when things move with AI, I think it gives telecom operators a license to play in a big opportunity with physical AI. It could be worth – if you believe some experts – hundreds of trillions of dollars as a total [addressable market].”

Tokens are units of data that are typically a piece of a word, or in the case of non-text modalities, a portion of an image or an audio clip. Tokens have now become the de facto billing metric for AI services, with enterprises paying by the number of tokens that their AI consumes.

That opportunity is also reliant on 6G, which while still years away from an actual standard, is already starting to power hyperbolic potential.

“We believe that 6G is the connective tissue for physical AI … and it is going to be the intelligent fabric that connects data centers, network edge, as well as AI devices itself,” Saw added. “So 6G is not just the connecting pipe, but really the nervous system for physical AI.”

For T-Mobile US, Gopalan likened this 6G and AI opportunity to what T-Mobile US has been able to do with fallow spectrum capacity to extend its FWA service.

“Physical and edge AI, and everything that a world that becomes increasingly connected brings to us as an opportunity,” Gopalan said. “The way I think of this is in an AI RAN, we will be using a lot more compute. And if you were to think about this, what 6G will be is a network that not just processes bits and bytes, but also tokens and effectively what physical and edge AI will do – a bit like FWA, where we ended up using fallow capacity – here you will end up having fallow compute that we could then put to use both in physical and edge AI.”

Despite the praise, T-Mobile US CFO Peter Osvaldik maintained that this impact remains outside of the carrier’s current two-year outlook window.

“There's actually nothing in the plan with respect to edge, or AI RAN, or any of that opportunity,” Osvaldik said. “Now, we see it and we're in a leadership position [and] I think it's going to drive fundamental growth. Whether any of it comes in in a meaningful manner by [2027], I don't know. That's potential upside.”