The first half of 2026 is reeling off at a hectic pace. With an ongoing series of large M&A actions altering the US consumer service competitive landscape, establishing a beachhead in multiservice convergence is a central preoccupation for operators hoping to insulate themselves from elevated churn within their core deliverables.
Against this backdrop, the three nationwide US telcos revamped their reporting during the Q1 2026 earnings cycle, with AT&T creating its ‘Advanced Connectivity’ umbrella, Verizon obscuring legacy revenue contributors, and T-Mobile now offering only account-level revenue figures. As a result, reporting across all three telcos became less transparent. Meanwhile, the US cable players continue to squirm under the hot lights, as their mobile success cannot obscure persistent home broadband struggles.
US telcos toss legacy apples-to-apples comparisons
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon all moved the goalposts for the Q1 2026 earnings report cycle. Ostensibly, for all three of the US telcos, the changes boil down to underscoring service account growth rather than focusing so much on pesky individual service-level metrics. A cynic would point out that these tweaks often obscure the drag from creaky corners of the business as well.
AT&T has gathered all its 5G and fibre service offerings under its new ‘Advanced Connectivity’ segment, underscoring the company’s fibre-focused multiservice convergence recipe for long-term retention and growth. In doing so, however, the company also effectively sweeps its DSL business under the rug for its long, slow denouement. Verizon, for its part, has adopted simplified reporting that breaks out mobile and broadband revenue but also obscures the contribution from legacy business, wholesale, and public sector units.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile has ditched per-user revenue reporting in favour of an aggregated account-level view, eschewing the more industry-standard average revenue per user (ARPU) and opting instead to let its average revenue per account (ARPA) do the talking. However, T-Mobile didn’t just stop reporting its line counts or giving detailed granularity on broadband; prepaid service has disappeared as a reporting concern as well.
To be fair, despite that griping, T-Mobile continues flashing signs of strength: 217,000 postpaid net account additions in Q1 2026 mark a 6% year-over-year (YoY) increase based on its new accounting. Likewise, the postpaid average revenue per account (ARPA) of $151.93 would be a +3.9% YoY increase.
That underscores why investors will grimace and move on with the US telcos’ reporting changes: The big three telcos are by and large doing well enough where it matters most to investors – albeit with something of an asterisk on Verizon’s return to postpaid mobile growth (if only because it remains early days for the Schulman regime). The same can’t be said of their cable rivals.
Even new convergence frameworks cannot hide the US cable behemoths’ broadband ills
The US cable operators would also desperately like to shift the conversation away from single-product metrics – in particular, their struggles in home broadband. However, investors would go into open revolt if they lost a barometric reading on a core connectivity pitch that’s been leaking subscribers at a concerning clip for years now. Thus, the cable players don’t have the luxury of overhauling the balance sheet metrics at this juncture.
On that score, Q1 2026 offered more of the same from the US cable camp: The total mobile line counts keep climbing, with the MVNO outfits from Comcast and Charter accounting for a combined 803,000 total net line adds, thanks in part to an outsized assist from free-line giveaways. And yet, the home broadband losses persist, with the two companies registering -185,000 net broadband subscriber losses between them.
Moreover, that result was despite Comcast benefiting from an enormous, largely one-off market messaging opportunity in Q1 2026 thanks to subsidiary NBCUniversal owning the broadcast rights to both the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics during the quarter.
Still, while US cable companies cannot turn down the focus on their broadband subscribership performance, that ultimately did not prevent them from trying to push new convergence and account-level metrics to the fore during their Q1 2026 earnings presentations. With newer metrics such as ‘domestic convergence revenue,’ all the US cable operators would like to reframe success around combined customer-level economics by focusing on multiservice penetration and total ARPU.
The rub for Comcast and Charter is that while both operators are (rightfully) leaning on multiservice convergence to counter persistent broadband subscriber and revenue pressure, mobile still doesn’t fully offset the core home broadband struggles. Take Comcast, for example: Comcast’s Q1 2026 broadband revenue decline (i.e., -5.1% YoY) drove its new ‘domestic convergence revenue’ metric down by -2.8% despite the +15% YoY growth in mobile revenue.
Until mobile’s contribution to the US cable players’ bottom line grows hefty enough to offset the downward broadband pressure – or that pressure abates – the companies’ broadband shortcomings will be left to wriggle underneath the hot lights every reporting cycle.
