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T-Mobile’s CFO Peter Osvaldik cheered the company’s fourth quarter results, which exceeded most analyst expectations. And the company’s investors cheered T-Mobile’s improved outlook for 2025, sending the company’s shares up almost 10% in trading on Wednesday.
But the company’s CEO, Mike Sievert, said he’s now looking beyond the company’s quarterly results and on to bigger things. He said T-Mobile’s new COO – Srinivasan Gopalan, who starts in March – will give him the time and space to “focus even more of my time on our longer term opportunities and strategy.”
Sievert hinted at some of those opportunities and strategies during T-Mobile’s quarterly conference call Wednesday: They include AI, network slicing and satellites.
Each of those technologies represents an opportunity for T-Mobile to make more money, according to Sievert.
AI and the DeepSeek angle
Sievert was asked about T-Mobile’s network and how it might handle additional traffic from AI services. Sievert didn’t say whether T-Mobile is seeing an increase in traffic on its network from AI, but he did say that AI in general represents an opportunity for T-Mobile to show off its 5G network.
“AI growth and AI workloads are going to be a way for us to increasingly showcase that [network] differentiation, especially as AI begins to make the leap from textual interfaces to much more video, audio, imagery,” he said. “It’s early days, but I think this is a nice tailwind for our business, because it’s going to be important that we’re able to showcase these advantages.”
But Sievert didn’t say anything about selling AI services directly to end users, like SK Telecom hopes to do.
Unlike AT&T’s CEO, Sievert didn’t directly discuss DeepSeek. That’s the Chinese AI service that upended Wall Street this week over fears that DeepSeek can provide cutting-edge services at a fraction of the cost of established players like OpenAI.
However, some financial analysts are now arguing that DeepSeek won’t directly impact Big Tech’s massive investments into AI infrastructure, at least over the long term. “DeepSeek’s contributions are noteworthy but part of the rapidly evolving generative AI industry rather than a big course correction in our view,” wrote the financial analysts at BofA Global Research in a recent note to investors.
And the financial analysts at TD Cowen argued that DeepSeek and similar services won’t have a long-term impact on the value of data centers (where AI services live) or telecommunications networks (which connect AI services with end users). “In our 20+ year experience, we continue to believe that in the long run ‘hot water may win or lose, cold water may win or lose, but the plumbing always wins,'” they wrote.
Network slicing opportunities
Sievert also said there’s growing interest in T-Mobile’s network slicing technology. That offering, which relies on 5G standalone (SA) systems, allows T-Mobile to dedicate a chunk of its network capacity to a specific customer. The operator first put network slicing to use in its T-Priority service for first responders.
“We waited a long time before starting to talk about all this stuff, because we wanted to see a real business model develop around it,” Sievert explained. “But the moment’s kind of arriving, and T-Priority’s certainly an expression of it.”
Sievert said network slicing will create a direct revenue opportunity from customers paying for the service, as well as a “share taking opportunity” among customers who shift their phones to T-Mobile because of its advanced offerings.
The satellite stuff
Finally, Sievert said that T-Mobile recently launched a beta test of its direct-to-device (D2D) service with SpaceX. That offering connects T-Mobile customers directly to SpaceX Starlink satellites when they’re outside of T-Mobile’s 5G coverage area.
“We see things coming together pretty quickly,” Sievert said, hinting that a commercial launch would happen relatively soon. He did not provide a firm launch date, however.
Sievert explained that T-Mobile will make money from those satellite connections by offering the service only on its most expensive plans. That, he said, will encourage customers to upgrade to those more expensive plans.
But Sievert also held out the possibility that T-Mobile would charge for SpaceX connections on an a la carte basis. “For those that don’t have the plans that include it, and lots of other customers, there may be opportunities there,” he said, without providing details.
It’s worth noting that the latest Apple iPhone software update adds support for SpaceX and T-Mobile’s direct-to-cell satellite service. That means it will sit alongside the direct-to-cell service run by Apple and Globalstar.
Sievert also addressed a question about whether T-Mobile would sell Starlink’s home broadband services in locations where it can’t provide its fixed wireless access (FWA) connections.
Starlink, Sievert said, has “more demand for their service than capacity right now and so they can sell everything they have available without any help from us. That being said, they are launching a lot [of satellites] and so those curves may cross at some point and we’d be delighted to be their partner.”
T-Mobile’s Q4 results and 2025 outlook
T-Mobile added 903,000 new postpaid phone customers during the fourth quarter of 2024, slightly below what it reported in the same quarter a year ago but ahead of most analyst expectations. The company also added an additional 428,000 FWA customers, slightly ahead of the 415,000 customers it gained in the third quarter of 2024.
For 2025, T-Mobile increased its growth expectations to between 5.5 million and 6 million postpaid net customer additions.
“To be sure, T-Mobile is still running circles around its competitors,” wrote the financial analysts at MoffettNathanson in a note to investors. “Over the past week, the market celebrated roughly in-line results and tepid guidance from each of AT&T and Verizon. T-Mobile, by contrast, beat on virtually every metric in today’s Q4 report, and their guidance for 2025, at least, promises more of the same.”
AT&T reported its fourth quarter results earlier this week, while Verizon reported late last week.