CEOs leading the trio of nationwide U.S. mobile operators faced the 5G music this week at a financial analyst conference.

T-Mobile US, Verizon, and AT&T aren’t complete contrasts, but the respective outlook of each carrier is abundant and wide due to gaps in 5G strategies and assets, the weights carried by legacy technology, and ill-advised pursuits in other industries.

The general consensus is thus: T-Mobile is on a long and sustained upward trajectory, Verizon is finding its way but losing some luster, and AT&T is distracted, hastily unraveling itself from a pair of media and entertainment businesses it paid a collective sum of $152 billion for starting in 2015. 

Indeed, every positive forward-looking expectation set by AT&T rides on its ability to increase investments in 5G and fiber. AT&T CEO John Stankey, during his interview at this week’s JPMorgan conference, said he is determined to grow in three areas: wireless, and broadband for consumers and enterprises.

Some of that relies of AT&T’s ability to retell its story in a new light, one unencumbered by a bold but ultimately failing strategy to own and bundle entertainment with mobile or broadband services. 

“We're still a little obtuse as to what the AT&T brand stands for,” Stankey said. “We need to be the best core connectivity provider in the market for both fixed and mobile, that's just where we need to be.”

That isn’t the case today, he effectively admitted. “I don't want to underestimate the work that has to be done to make that happen. And I'm not naive, that that means we have to change our brand position, that that means we have some work to do on our customer support processes,” he said. 

“We think there's segments that the best way to serve the customer is to not only give them a fantastic wireless service, but also a really scaled, fixed connection to go along with it,” Stankey said, adding that every customer won’t need or want that, but many will.

He is particularly confident about opportunities that he expects to continue growing around remote work, which accelerated dramatic amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “ I don't think this collapses. I think we've got all businesses right now asking the question, ‘what is the new work environment?’” he said. “It's not going back to the way they were, it's a hybrid. It's going to be a couple days a week in the traditional workplace and some flexibility of working outside of the workplace.”

Conversely, however, large enterprises that spent heavily in the early days of the pandemic to re-engineer their business to deal with the shift to remote work, have since pulled back on those investments, he said. “I’m not seeing as much of that right now.”

Verizon this month also announced plans to abandon its stakes in the entertainment space, selling Yahoo and AOL for about half what it paid for the companies starting in 2015. 

The operator’s media pursuits weren’t well regarded by many, but they also didn’t carry the amount of burden and debt that AT&T took on through much larger deals. Verizon’s more reserved approach to media acquisitions turned out to be the right call in that regard, albeit it certainly could have done better without it altogether.

Verizon’s 5G strategy has been relatively stable, however it has scaled back ambitions for millimeter-wave 5G, relegating the high-band spectrum to dense urban environments, venues, and private networks.

The carrier’s oft-repeated talking points are getting stale and overexposed though. They always sounded over-workshopped, the type of catchy cliches that probably came from an outside consultancy that told Verizon what it wanted to hear instead of what it needed to hear. CEO Hans Vestberg mentions the “eight currencies of 5G” or Verizon’s “five pillars of growth” almost every time he speaks publicly, and this week was no exception on the latter.

Verizon, soon to be free of its meandering pursuits in the media business, is also positioning its 5G mobile network for fixed access use at home, a service it calls 5G Home. “This is a unique opportunity, which we have never seen in our industry before because of economics,” Vestberg said. “Nobody has been able to build a fixed wireless access in the mobile network.”

This service could eventually be available nationwide, or wherever Verizon has the necessary spectrum and infrastructure, but since it’s riding on the same network as its purely mobile services, scale and bandwidth will have to be managed on a localized basis, he explained.

Vestberg also pushed back against concerns that its additional capex of $10 billion over the next three years is enough to deploy a nationwide 5G footprint riding on recently acquired mid-band spectrum, equating it to an upgrade on Verizon’s existing network infrastructure. 

“We are confident, we know our grid, we know the capacities,” he said, adding that capex levels will return to previous levels at the end of that three-year cycle. “We are not building new towers. We are basically going once to the site and upgrading” to C-band radios.

T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert, as he and his colleagues are often wont to do, had a field day comparing the position of the company he leads to its competitors. When the operator announced its intention to merge with Sprint in 2018, “we weren’t obsessed with media companies, or satellite companies, or millimeter-wave 5G like our competitors were breathlessly talking about. We were focused on getting the crown jewel asset around mid-band 5G,” he said at the conference.

“We understood that simple basic truth that all content and communications of all kinds are leaving their prior linear forms and landing on the internet, and the internet is going mobile,” Sievert said. 

“Years later, our competitors are kind of finally realizing that mobile internet pure-play is a good place to be. The problem is they are years behind us, and we think we have the wherewithal to keep it that way,” he said. “We have grown up. We are stewards of this industry now. This is our house. We have to make sure to take care of it.”

Sievert also dismissed the series of lenses most industry insiders use to view different forms of connectivity. It’s a disservice to define these different mediums based on the capital invested, materials used, or legacy position of the provider, he said, adding that customers just want internet connectivity.

“That’s why years ago we created the strategy of being the leading pure-play mobile internet company for the 5G era. And today, on that strategy, which we have been clear and consistent and never changing from, we are the leaders, and we intend to be the leaders for the duration of the 5G era,” Sievert said. 

T-Mobile has proven many years over that it can compete on value, but more recently it’s competing on service quality as well, he said. “We have the opportunity now to be the first company in the history of our industry to be able to simultaneously offer you the best value and the best network. No one has ever been able to offer that before and it’s a big potential tailwind for our ability to continue growing.”

Finally, Sievert concluded his interview at the conference with a refreshingly realistic take on 5G while taking jabs at those who constantly question how carriers plan to make money from 5G. “I’ve always thought it was kind of a crazy question because 5G is just the next G. I mean we have to do it. Our capital profile is reasonably consistent over time,” he said. “So monetization of it [5G], it’s the same game plan we’ve always had, which is grow our company, grow our share, and move people up the experience curve with us.”