- AT&T is expected to close its acquisition of Lumen’s fiber assets any day now
- Last weekend, the company aired an ad saying AT&T wireless and home internet are “now available across the nation”
- CEO John Stankey said during the Q4 2025 earnings call that they want to build awareness that AT&T is a capable national ISP across consumer and business
Ahead of AT&T’s closure of its acquisition of fiber assets from Lumen, AT&T has enlisted “MamaGorgon85” to get out the message that it offers internet services across the country.
Who is MamaGorgon85, you might ask? She’s a mother who slays at online gaming in a TV ad that was spotted by Wave7 Research during an NFL broadcast playoff game last weekend.
The spot ends with the announcer saying, “AT&T wireless and home internet, now available across the nation.”
Wait. Is AT&T claiming it offers wireless and fiber internet everywhere? Not exactly.
As always, it’s wise to check for the fine print, which you can see under the bolder text if you squint: “Available in select areas only. Check availability and learn more at att.com/internet.”
Fierce reached out to AT&T for more context about the commercial, and a spokesperson said pretty much the same thing: “We provide internet service to millions of customers across the nation, with availability varying by location. Customers are encouraged to check which services are offered in their area by visiting: https://www.att.com/internet/availability/.”
AT&T ad: New to us
Jeff Moore, principal of Wave7 Research, said he’s unaware of any nationwide advertising for AT&T internet prior to this. It’s not unusual for AT&T to advertise AT&T fiber, but that’s usually done through local TV, radio and print advertising rather than during a nationally televised football game.
“For them to put home internet that is wireless and wireline under one banner and running a single ad, that is new and completely different,” he told Fierce.
AT&T is buying 3.45 GHz spectrum licenses from EchoStar and that deal still requires regulatory approvals but through a managed lease arrangement, AT&T was able to deploy a great deal of that spectrum ahead of the close. That is helping in its quest to provide internet service through fixed wireless access (FWA), branded as AT&T Internet Air. The company added 221,000 new Internet Air customers in Q4 2025.
AT&T CEO: Building awareness
Although the MamaGorgon85 commercial wasn’t specifically mentioned, AT&T CEO John Stankey was asked about his company’s national advertising and the converged fiber/fixed wireless message at the end of the Q4 2025 earnings call on Wednesday.
He said they’ve done a lot of A/B testing and found they have more to gain from a broader – what he called “generic” – message about its internet service at the national level versus a more targeted missive.
“We want to build awareness that AT&T is a capable, national internet provider across consumers and business broadly and we have a lot of upside in the customer base to do that,” he said.
Including Gigapower and the fiber assets that AT&T is acquiring from Lumen, AT&T expects to reach over 40 million customer locations with fiber services by the end of this year, up from 32 million at the end of 2025, he said.
Analyst: Still small % of households
But analysts point out that AT&T’s fiber footprint is still miniscule. “We continue to struggle with the premise of a convergence strategy that is only available to less than 15% of U.S. households and lacks a viable path to anything more than about one in three,” wrote MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett in a report for investors.
New Street Research analyst David Barden suspects AT&T is adding more Internet Air customers in rural markets where they don’t have fiber, which is helping them generate higher ARPUs due to a lack of alternative for customers. “In contrast, T-Mobile has said that over 70% of their FWA customers are in urban and suburban markets,” he noted in a January 28 research note.
For his part, Wave7's Moore expects that we’re all going to see a lot more of these kinds of ads from both AT&T and Verizon, which recently closed on its Frontier acquisition.
“We’re going to see a lot more sort of broad pitches in the future,” he concluded.