AT&T and Verizon used their latest earnings reports to show how wireless and home internet are becoming more connected inside telecom growth strategy.

Both companies gave investors more detail around convergence, household penetration, cross-sell, churn, and account economics.

AT&T provided the clearest financial evidence that convergence is becoming part of its growth story. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $31.5 billion, up 2.9% from the year-ago quarter. AT&T said the increase was largely due to growth in Advanced Connectivity wireless and fiber revenues, including two months of impact from customers acquired through its Lumen transaction. Legacy revenues declined 25.3% year over year, reflecting lower demand as AT&T continues decommissioning its copper-based network.

AT&T’s Advanced Connectivity service revenue was $22.9 billion, up 3.6% year over year. Advanced Connectivity operating income rose 14.8%, and EBITDA increased 5.6%. The company said Advanced Connectivity segment revenue grew 4.7%, driven by service revenue growth and higher wireless equipment revenue.

The company also reported its fastest-ever year-over-year organic growth in its advanced home internet convergence rate. AT&T said 42% of households with its advanced home internet services also chose AT&T wireless. Excluding the impact of fiber customers acquired during the quarter, that figure approached nearly 45%, up more than 3 percentage points year over year.

AT&T defines converged customers as advanced home internet connections, including AT&T Fiber and AT&T Internet Air, that are also primary wireless account holders subscribing to consumer postpaid phone service. For subscription operators outside telecom, the metric is a way to measure how many customers are expanding from one recurring service into a broader account relationship.

AT&T also added 584,000 total consumer and business Advanced Connectivity internet customers during the quarter, including 292,000 fiber net additions and 292,000 fixed wireless net additions. On the wireless side, the company reported 294,000 postpaid phone net additions with postpaid phone churn of 0.89%. For non-telecom readers, postpaid phone net additions measure the net change in monthly billed wireless phone subscribers after additions and disconnections.

AT&T has also moved its consumer product strategy further in this direction. On March 31, the company launched AT&T OneConnect, which it describes as one subscription for wireless and home internet, with one all-in monthly price and taxes and fees included. AT&T said OneConnect builds on the fact that customers who subscribe to both AT&T Fiber and AT&T wireless report higher satisfaction and stay with AT&T longer. Because OneConnect launched at the end of the quarter, it should be viewed as evidence of AT&T’s product direction, not as a material driver of Q1 results.

Verizon’s results also support the convergence story, but in a different way. The company reported total operating revenue of $34.4 billion, up 2.9% year over year. Mobility and Broadband service revenue reached approximately $22.9 billion, up 1.6% year over year. Verizon said its first-quarter revenue result included an 80 basis point impact to wireless service revenue growth due to the January network outage.

Verizon’s wireless service revenue was $20.6 billion, down 1% year over year. On the company’s earnings call, Verizon said its reported Mobility and Broadband service revenue growth included one-time pressure of 80 basis points on wireless service revenue from customer credits and other impacts related to the network outage. The company also said Q1 would be the low point for Mobility and Broadband service revenue growth in 2026.

Even with that pressure, Verizon reported 55,000 total postpaid phone net additions in Q1, its first positive first-quarter result in that category since 2013. The company said that represented a year-over-year improvement of more than 340,000. It also reported 341,000 broadband net additions, including 214,000 fixed wireless access net additions and 127,000 fiber broadband net additions. Verizon noted in the earnings call that Frontier results were included beginning January 20, the date the acquisition closed, and that Q1 broadband net additions excluded the first 20 days of January for Frontier.

Verizon’s bundle-related evidence is less about a disclosed revenue line and more about churn, lifetime value, ARPA, and cross-sell opportunity. On the company’s earnings call, CEO Dan Schulman described convergence as one of Verizon’s “key vectors of growth.” He said only about 20% of Verizon’s consumer postpaid phone base has broadband, creating a large cross-sell opportunity. He also said churn is almost 30% lower on converged offers, which have higher lifetime value and ARPA, or average revenue per account.

Verizon also said its wireless attachment rate when a customer has broadband is approximately 55%. For subscription operators, that attachment rate is the clearest Verizon metric showing how broadband can support wireless cross-sell inside the same customer account.

Neither AT&T nor Verizon disclosed bundle revenue as a separate percentage of total revenue in the earnings materials reviewed. But both companies are pointing investors toward account-level measures of value. The bundle, or what telecom companies increasingly describe as convergence, is becoming less about a one-time discount and more about managing the value of a multi-product account relationship.

INSIDER TAKE

If this sounds familiar, it should.

Charter’s Q1 results showed how a cable operator can use mobile, simplified pricing, and streaming app access to defend the customer relationship as traditional broadband and video pressure continue.

AT&T and Verizon are showing the telecom version of the same pressure point. Growth is increasingly about the account, not just the product.

For subscription executives, the important takeaway is not that telecom companies are offering bundles. That part is familiar. The more important shift is that bundles are being used to manage account quality.

A single-product subscriber can churn from one service. A household account with wireless, broadband, security, device coverage, streaming access, or other recurring benefits becomes harder to replace and harder to unwind. That is why the most useful metrics are not only net additions.

This also matters outside telecom. If major operators are building growth around household relationships, then subscription brands that sit adjacent to those relationships may have new partner distribution opportunities. Streaming services, apps, security products, productivity tools, wellness services, media subscriptions, and other recurring products could increasingly be evaluated as part of a larger bundled value proposition.

But the lesson is not simply to get into a bundle. The lesson is to understand what the bundle changes.

Bundles can improve distribution, retention, and perceived value. They can also complicate customer ownership, billing, cancellation, data access, support, revenue share, and performance measurement.

The next question for subscription operators is whether bundled customers become better customers. AT&T and Verizon are both pushing the market toward that question, but AT&T is giving the cleaner revenue evidence today, while Verizon is making the operational case around churn, lifetime value, and cross-sell potential.