- During its Capital Markets Day this week, T-Mobile revealed it’s no longer going to report postpaid phone net additions on a quarterly basis
- Net phone additions provide an apples-to-apples comparison about how mobile network operators are performing
- T-Mobile said it wants to focus on “accounts” as it looks to areas beyond cell phone service for revenue
About mid-way through T-Mobile’s two+ hour Capital Markets Day presentation on Wednesday, CFO Peter Osvaldik dropped a bit of a bombshell, at least to this reporter’s ears: Beginning in Q1 2026, the company will no longer be reporting postpaid phone net adds.
What?!!!!! For years, this has been the metric used to gauge the growth (or lack thereof) of mobile carriers.
It’s the easy button for comparing how the carriers are doing against their rivals. If one has a blockbuster quarter and another tanks, it’s right there in the net adds.
Not so much anymore. The times they are a-changinꞌ and we’re all expected to roll with the punches.
The move didn’t seem to go over well among analysts who crunch numbers for a living.
“Disclosure changes to subscribers – not a lot of love for that,” declared a subhead in New Street Research analyst David Barden’s note for investors on Wednesday.
According to Barden, most investors’ immediate response went something like this: “Do they think they’re Netflix?” The streaming service stopped reporting its subscriber count last year – a huge change for a company whose stock often moved up or down depending on those numbers.
Dissecting T-Mobile’s logic
T-Mobile’s management explained that 90% of their postpaid phone lines are multi-line accounts and a significant portion of T-Mobile customers use more than a phone – they have tablets, watches or subscribe to its broadband service as well. Therefore, it makes more sense to report postpaid accounts rather than phone net adds.
Clearly, it caused a stir. The elimination of the postpaid phone subscriber metric was the subject of the first question asked during the Q&A session on Wednesday.
“These are really families and businesses, that's the fundamental way in which consumers buy,” T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan responded, repeating the 90% figure.
T-Mobile’s reasoning didn’t convince everyone it’s the right way to go. “We understand the logic presented by management, but we think this was the wrong time to move away from postpaid phone net adds disclosure,” Barden wrote. “With competition heating up, detractors will point to this change as management trying to hide subscriber performance.”
Net additions have been foundational to telecom service provider metrics for a long time and provide observers with an apples-to-apples comparison among the Big 3 mobile network operators, said Bill Ho, founder and principal analyst at 556 Ventures.
“Cynically, companies have been providing metrics to their benefit to mask poor areas,” he told Fierce. “Perhaps some smart people can find enough data to extract the net adds.”
OK, so what are Verizon and AT&T doing?
Fierce reached out to Verizon and AT&T to see if they will continue to report net phone additions on a quarterly basis.
“Yes, we will continue to report postpaid phone net adds and postpaid phone lines,” a Verizon spokesperson said. (Verizon posted 616,000 postpaid phone net additions in the fourth quarter of 2025, marking its best quarter of postpaid phone net adds since 2019.)
An AT&T spokesperson confirmed they will continue reporting postpaid phone net adds as well.
However, “we have de-emphasized postpaid net adds over the past several years, instead focusing on profitability metrics like ARPU and wireless service revenues,” said AT&T Corporate Communications Executive Brittany Siwald.
This has been a key differentiator for AT&T against both T-Mobile and Verizon, who have leaned heavily on promotions and phone subs as a leading indicator of success, according to Siwald.
“Our priority has been on ‘winning the home,’ meaning advancing our converged customer base – those that have both AT&T wireless and internet (currently 42% of AT&T Fiber customers also have AT&T wireless),” she told Fierce.
Indeed, AT&T last month announced that effective Q1 2026, it will modify its internal and segment reporting to reflect the evolution of its business model to focus on delivering “converged advanced connectivity services across 5G and fiber to consumer and business customers.”
Its new reportable segments are Advanced Connectivity, which includes domestic 5G and fiber-based wireless, internet and other advanced connectivity services; Legacy, which represents domestic legacy voice and data services provided over its copper-based network; and Latin America, which embodies its wireless business in Mexico.
Analysts: It’s a maturing market
Circling back to T-Mobile, TD Cowen analyst Greg Williams said it’s disappointing to see the carrier report fewer metrics. But it’s indicative of a maturing market, one that’s seeing a more aggressive Verizon with new CEO Dan Schulman. All of the Big 3 carriers encourage investors to focus on more promising areas of growth, such as fiber to the home and fixed wireless access (FWA) convergence.
“For T-Mobile, the company also sees new growth opportunities at its T-Ads business (from Vistar and Blith), financial services (T-Mobile Visa, leveraging its scale and lower customer acquisition costs) and AI edge (believing AI inference may occur at the base station),” he said in a research note.
New Street’s Barden agreed that T-Mobile does have a point.
“They will report accounts, ARPA and churn and so the default is to model out how the business really looks one level higher above individual users into user groups. This is not Netflix getting rid of subscriber reporting altogether. There is still substance here,” he noted.
All that said, T-Mobile, which saw 3.3 million postpaid phone net adds in 2025, said it expects about 2.5 million postpaid phone net adds in 2026, so there’s that.
“T-Mobile has a history of guiding conservatively and beating and raising on net adds quarterly. What changes in 2026 is that there is no actual ‘postpaid phone net add’ number anymore and we expect we may not see that number discussed ever again. Analysts will ask. But it’s most likely just gone,” Barden concluded.