AT&T CEO Sees Carriers Getting Additional Spectrum for 5G
AT&T CEO John Stankey is optimistic that the FCC under new Chairman Brendan Carr will make more spectrum available for full-power, licensed use, though the business leader sounded a note of caution about the round of tariffs that President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday.
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Stankey noted Carr’s speech Monday at the Mobile World Congress (see 2503030040). Making more spectrum available “will be good for the consumers because it's how we ensure that there's innovation and technology, and I think it's good for AT&T,” Stankey said at a Morgan Stanley financial conference Tuesday. He also welcomed Carr’s focus on cutting regulatory red tape for deploying broadband. "I'm more buoyant right now than I was four years ago in general.”
Stankey seemed more cautious about tariffs. “There is a lot going on in the world right now,” he said. Some countries “take advantage of selling into the U.S. markets, but we've got to be very, very careful and precise about how we administer things like tariffs.”
AT&T saw some acceleration in wireless churn in January after it had better results than expected in Q4 (see 2501270047), the CEO noted. The company reported 482,000 postpaid phone net adds in the quarter, with postpaid phone churn of 0.85%. “We gave back in January a little bit of that higher growth that we saw in the fourth quarter,” Stankey said. “February is right back to where we expected February to be,” and March is off to a positive start, he added.