- CEO Srini Gopalan noted the Wingstop fiasco during his presentation at T-Mobile’s Capital Markets Day
- Chicken shortages aside, building relationships with customers means giving them more value for their money, according to the exec
- T-Mobile also presented Q4 2025 results during the event, reporting 962,000 new postpaid phone customers in the quarter
T-Mobile customers like their chicken, so much so that when the carrier enlisted Wingstop to give away chicken on a T-Mobile Tuesday last year, the restaurant chain ran out of tasty tenders.
Of course, that incident resulted in a lot of angry customers, but it’s one example that new CEO Srini Gopalan used to show how T-Mobile thinks differently than its chief rivals Verizon and AT&T.
It’s about more than just offering a free phone every three years, he said at T-Mobile’s Capital Markets Day in New York City today.
“The bouquet of things that we offer and the savings we drive every day – because there's a 20 to 30% gap in terms of value – we're able to provide new customers,” he said. “That best value is something we're going to guard zealously. That's something we will protect. That is our heritage, and that's something we will not give up purely because we have best network.”
Gopalan, who assumed the CEO position in November, used the event to drive home how T-Mobile is distinguishing itself by focusing on its “best network, best value and best customer experiences” proposition.
A lot of financial and industry analysts for years have thought that T-Mobile has the best network, but now that message is resonating with consumers, he said, pointing to a J.D. Power customer survey that rated T-Mobile as No. 1 in network quality, unseating Verizon for the first time after 35 reports over 17 years.
“We're committed to network leadership, and we're committed to expanding this lead,” Gopalan said.
T-Mobile’s Q4 numbers
One of the things its 5G network has enabled T-Mobile to do is expand into the fixed wireless access (FWA) business, which had zero subscribers in 2020. It’s now grown the business to a base of 8.5 million FWA subscribers.
T-Mobile added 495,000 FWA subscribers in Q4 2025 and today announced a target of 15 million by 2030.
The company also reported adding 962,000 new postpaid phone customers in Q4 2025, beating rivals AT&T and Verizon on that metric. Verizon posted 616,000 postpaid phone customers in Q4, marking its strongest postpaid performance since 2019. AT&T reported 421,000 postpaid phone net adds in Q4.
But going forward, T-Mobile said it will not be reporting “subscriber-level” postpaid phone net additions, which historically many analysts used to compare and contrast wireless carriers’ financials.
The reason?
According to T-Mobile executives, it’s about building “relationships” with customers rather than counting phone lines.
“I think of them as relationships because these are really families and businesses. That's the fundamental way in which consumers buy,” Gopalan said.
“Over 90% of our postpaid phone lines are multi-line accounts,” T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik said. Plus, a significant portion of T-Mobile accounts have products beyond phone lines, whether that's tablets, watches or broadband service, and they want to introduce customers to more products, like T-Mobile Visa, that increase overall service revenue.
Bits and bytes
Here are some more tidbits from T-Mobile’s Capital Markets Day event:
Spectrum
“The way we've thought about spectrum historically – and we’ll be consistent with that – is every piece of spectrum that comes up, we look at it on a build-versus-buy basis. What would it cost to densify versus buying the spectrum?” Gopalan said. “That's why we walked away from things like the EchoStar spectrum. We fundamentally believed it was too expensive.”
Fiber
“We see fiber as a real opportunity to create customer and equity value. We're not targeting a number,” Gopalan said. “Are we open to looking at more assets? Yes, at the right price because we're not going to sit here with a gun to our head … while people inflate their prices.”
AI RAN and 6G
T-Mobile in 2024 announced the creation of the AI RAN Innovation Center, where it’s working with partners like Nvidia, Nokia and Ericsson to develop and test a new architecture.
T-Mobile CTO John Saw was asked to provide an update on its thinking around AI RAN and 6G.
“6G is not just the connecting pipe, but really the nervous system for physical AI. That is why we are focused on AI RAN. We wanted to change the way compute is done in telco for generations now and bringing a more powerful compute model that does tokens and bits,” he said. “We're making good progress.”
Both Nokia and Ericsson are now able to make full voice calls through the Nvidia platform and toward the end of 2026, they expect to start some field trials, he said.
T-Satellite
“T-Satellite, from our perspective, has been a huge success,” Gopalan said.
But it’s a complementary service, not a replacement for terrestrial wireless.
“It’s great for the 500,000 square miles of uncovered America to have an alternative, but let’s be realistic. In Manhattan, I want my wireless network, right? I think the emerging understanding across the industry is that this is a great complementary service … We like our partnership very much with Starlink.”