Q2 2026: 432,000 postpaid phone net adds (beating estimates of roughly 338,500), postpaid phone churn of 0.86%, postpaid phone ARPU of $58.01, wireless service revenue of $17.41 billion. Converged customers — those taking both wireless and home internet from AT&T — reached 6.0 million, a 42.5% convergence rate, and AT&T's own management stated plainly that converged customers churn less and carry higher lifetime value.
At 0.86% monthly churn, modeled average subscriber lifetime runs about 116 months. On a per-phone-line basis (not the multi-line account basis T-Mobile reports), applying a ~40% margin to the $58.01 ARPU gives a modeled LTV near $2,690. Using an assumed CAC of $450, that's a payback period of about 19 months and an LTV:CAC near 6x — solidly positive, but structurally lower than T-Mobile's per-account economics simply because this is a per-line, not per-account, comparison; the two aren't directly apples-to-apples.
Revenue growth read: net adds are beating expectations and churn is stable, but AT&T itself is explicit that convergence — not wireless alone — is the growth engine; wireless-only churn resistance is real but smaller than the churn reduction convergence delivers.
Simplest path: one bill, one network, one reason to never call a competitor. AT&T's CEO put it in four words on the Q2 call — "Where we have fiber, we win" — which is really just convergence restated as simply as possible. The strategy isn't complicated; it's just under-deployed relative to AT&T's footprint.
Revenue, subscriber, churn, and ARPU figures are sourced from AT&T's Q2 2026 earnings release and SEC filings. CAC, LTV, and payback period are my own modeled assumptions, built where AT&T doesn't disclose the underlying figures directly. The "simplest path" framing is my own synthesis, not a statement from AT&T.