T-Mobile US, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS) Wells Fargo 8th Annual TMT Summit Conference December 3, 2024 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Jon Freier - President, Consumer Group
Cathy Yao - SVP, Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Eric Luebchow - Wells Fargo

Eric Luebchow

All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit. We're going to kick it off today. My name is Eric Luebchow, Head of telecom services and communications infrastructure research in this morning. Very pleased to be joined by Jon Freier. He's the President of the Consumer Group at T-Mobile; and Cathy Yao, who's the SVP of Investor Relations. Thanks for joining us.

Cathy Yao

Thanks for having us. Before we get started, we'll be making some forward-looking commentary that involve risks and uncertainties. Please see the risk factors in our SEC filings. To the extent that we reference non-GAAP financial measures, please see our Investor Relations Web site for a reconciliation with our GAAP measures.

Eric Luebchow

So Jon, maybe to kick it off, we're right in the heart of a very competitive holiday season. We just had Black Friday, we've had new phone launches with the new iPhone a couple of months ago and some holiday promotions. So maybe you could just update us on the state of the competitive market in Q4, how things are tracking? It looked to us like a lot of the carriers had pretty similar promotional offers in the market in early Q4 from previous years, but maybe you could update us on that.

Jon Freier

Yes, it's great to be here with you, too, Eric, and thanks for having us. This business is such a great business. When you think about how the industry is growing its overall service revenues, how it's growing its EBITDA and how that's converting into free cash and customers are winning more than ever when you look at the value that customers are getting now on better networks than ever. And this Black Friday weekend was my 31st Black Friday weekend in this business. And what's consistent about the Black Friday weekend is it's always intense promotionally and that's generally the season where you see the most intense promotions that are happening in the marketplace, and this was no different. In terms of the competitive environment being very vibrant and everybody being out there and as we're all seeing, watching football, we can see all of our ads, our competitors' ads, et cetera, and you can see how intense these promotions are. It's similar in terms of what we saw in terms of shaping from a Black Friday weekend perspective versus prior years to the premise of your question, it wasn't all that different. There were some promotions that were different than others in the past. But in terms of how we solve things unfold within our business, we are very, very pleased over the Black Friday weekend, everything unfolded exactly as we planned.

And what I'm pleased to tell you is that during Q3, our earnings call for Q3 back in October, Peter Osvaldik laid out 3 million postpaid phone net guidance for the entire year, which is a subset of the 5.6 million to 5.8 million of total postpaid net additions. We're right on track with that overall guidance based on what we're seeing. So very much a back end of the quarter. We mentioned that last quarter in our earnings call, it's a back ended loaded quarter. But everything that we're seeing so far we're right on track to where we want it to be and I was very pleased about how the overall week end unfolded.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Eric Luebchow

Okay, great. And kind of coupling that with another topic that we've seen more recently is just a historically low upgrade rate environment. Throughout the course of the year, we've seen upgrade rates down across the industry, obviously, helping retention efforts at a lot of the carriers. But with the new iPhone release, some of the new AI functionality that we're seeing introduced, do you think we're set for a bigger year of upgrades or more switching activity as you look into 2025?

Jon Freier

It's hard to know. It's hard to know where upgrades are going. And to your point that we've seen these kind of record low upgrade rates across the entire industry. That's not a phenomenon that's exclusive to us, you're seeing that across the entire industry. And that's a testament, in my view, to Apple and Samsung and Google making such great devices that are lasting longer and customers are keeping them longer. And then what's specific to us is that 80% of our postpaid customers have a 5G device. So when you're looking at the experience difference from one model to the next model, there might not be as much of a difference given that the base already has 80% to 5G devices. So we're seeing that upgrade growth being lower. It's hard to know. Now what we saw during the early days of the iPhone 16 launch is we saw our sales up on a year-over-year basis. But for us switching was up, gross adds were up, overall demand was up during that period of time. And so when you look at the overall upgrade rates, yes, lower, but overall sales were up given the demand and the switching that's coming into our business versus others.

Eric Luebchow

No, fair enough. And I also wanted to touch on capital allocation. Obviously, you had your Capital Markets Day a few months ago. Maybe you could just give us an update on share buybacks in the fourth quarter, any changes to your capital allocation philosophy, especially recently, you've had run-up in share price, which is a very good problem to have, but how does that influence your thoughts on capital allocation?

Jon Freier

I know Cathy is dying to answer those questions. So let me turn it to her.

Cathy Yao

That's a great question. Our capital allocation philosophy has been remarkably consistent. We've always said that our first priority is to invest in our core business, followed by strategic investments that generate high value accretive returns over time and then return what's left over to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. We also said on our Q3 call that we updated our plan to be one that is much more predictable and we have been active in the market since that point.

Eric Luebchow

And just to follow up on that, Cathy, I know at your Capital Markets Day, you did give some guidance measures for 2025, service revenue, ARPA, EBITDA, CapEx, you didn't talk about free cash flow. So maybe you could provide any color on how we should think about free cash flow trajectory into 2025?

Cathy Yao

Yes, absolutely. So obviously, we'll have a lot more to share shortly in a couple of months on our Q4 call as we always do. But what's very exciting about 2025 is that it's the year of the investment for us. It's where we'll invest in our digital transformation as well as our technology transformation. Even with our investments and even with a full year of ACP rolling off plus DISH and TracFone continuing to roll off, we expect to deliver industry leading mid single digit EBITDA growth. We also said on our Q3 call that we are amending some securitization facilities where we'll take some proceeds out of cash from investing into cash from operating and specifically into working capital. Adjusted for those changes, we continue to expect working capital to be about the same on a year-over-year basis and obviously, no changes to our free cash flow from the amendments. I just wanted to flag that. We also said that we expect CapEx to be in the run rate of $9 billion to $10 billion. But obviously, a lot more color to come in a few short weeks here.

Eric Luebchow

Okay. I appreciate that, Cathy. So I wanted to switch to, obviously, one of the big topics over the last few months and that's been convergence between wireless and wireline. AT&T this morning had an announcement to reach 50 million homes, Verizon and Frontier, have some announcements on their future fiber footprint. So clearly, your two largest peers are moving in the direction of more fiber Internet bundled with mobile. You guys obviously have some JVs in the market. But does that -- do these announcements at all change your strategic thoughts about the importance of having a broader fiber footprint versus what you've already announced?

Jon Freier

They don't. And the reason why is that when you look at convergence, we believe that convergence is here. It's not coming, it's here. And when you think about customers -- in more than 80% of customers for the last five years have been able to purchase a mobile product and a broadband product from the same provider. And during that period of time, you've seen our results and how we've been successful during that phenomenon. And what we're seeing is that when you look at penetration and overall growth in fiber markets versus non-fiber markets, there's no difference. And we're actually growing our share in fiber markets where so-called convergence is already here. And so wireless is just a much more considered sale. I mean when you think about broadband, do you want it? Yes or no. Yes. Okay, what are your options? A lot of times, not many. And you just want a great price for a great product and that's kind of it. From a wireless perspective, in terms of how the US marketplace is organized, it's a very different considered purchase. And obviously, the value proposition for what we offer goes way beyond just price versus product when you think about all the benefits that you get with Magenta Status and streaming benefits and in-flight benefits and international coverage benefits, et cetera. The value proposition is very different.

And so many people are -- they're using AutoPay anyway. So it's not like you're at the old days of sitting at your kitchen table writing out three checks and wouldn't be great to write one check, everybody is on AutoPay anyway. So that's not really a big difference in terms of convenience factor. And yes, I mean, $10 is $10 if people want to say that. But when you think about the value that you can get from a provider like us versus our competitors that kind of falls by the wayside fast. So that's not something that we're worried about. Now we are, to your point, we are into some partnerships. We've announced joint ventures that we haven't closed yet. And we believe those business cases on a stand-alone basis are worth their own merit but it's not some defense mechanism or some things that we have to go do to protect our mobile business. Our mobile business is in a great position today. It's been durable over the next five years and irrespective of what others are doing, we believe it will continue to be durable for the years ahead.

Eric Luebchow

And some of your peers have talked about how bundling fiber Internet with mobile can lead to better retention, reduce churn. They put some stats out there on that. I mean do you see any sign of that whatsoever when you're going up against fiber in terms of switching activity from your peers? And also, you have a very large fixed wireless footprint as well. Are there any retention benefits to bundling a fixed wireless product with a mobile product?

Jon Freier

There are. And you've heard us talk a lot about over the years about deepening customer relationships, which is really kind of going beyond the smartphone relationship. So it's not something that is exclusive to a fixed wireless product or a fiber product in our experience but having multiple connections across the entire account, a smartphone, a tablet, a watch and again, a fixed wireless product. Those multiple connections does create stickiness and that's what we're seeing as well. When we see customers that have a deeper relationship with more products, including fixed wireless access, yes, the churn is lower. But the churn is also lower when they have a tablet or a watch without fixed wireless access. So having a multiple product approach across a customer's account and deepening that relationship absolutely does create retention and stickiness and lowers overall churn.

Eric Luebchow

I wanted to touch on the SMRA markets or the small and rural area markets that you've talked about quite a bit over the last few years. So maybe you could talk about where you stand today on penetration of those markets, where you could go in the future? And do you have the network, the distribution in places today where you feel like you can continue to further accelerate share gains in those markets? An update there would be great.

Jon Freier

Yes. When I talk about role, I felt like I'm about to wind myself up and let a rip here. This is just a growth segment that I've been so excited about and have been championing for a number of years within our company. And back in 2021, we were nowhere in smaller markets and rural areas. We basically had a share position of 13% and we were nowhere. So that's why we declared at our Capital Markets Day back in March of 2021 of getting to 20% share of household by the end of 2025. We're well on our way to that. And what we recently announced at our Capital Markets Day this year is that we've proven this overall market, which is 40% of the United States, 140 million people, 50 million households, 40% of the United States. This overall market is now an established, proven growth driver for our company. And so what we're focused on is we're focused on winning switching decisions, unlocking switching decisions and winning the switching decisions. In Q2, April, May and June of this year, that was our highest share of switching and we were number one in the marketplace across smaller markets, rural areas. It's a record for us. That record quickly fell because in Q3, we beat that. And we had a higher switching in terms of win share of the switchers in the market and it was our best performance that we've had to date. So that's great news. And that's what we want to continue to be focused on is winning those switching decisions and continuing to drive this overall business.

The other thing that I highlighted at the Capital Markets Day is our Net Promoter Scores. We're now 20% higher than the next highest competitor and we've almost doubled our Net Promoter Scores from when we started this overall effort back in 2021. Why is that important? It's important because Net Promoter Scores is the biggest indicator for ongoing advocacy and loyalty. So what we have to drive is, of course, from our share position, great loyalty, good churn, the whole thing but much more opportunity and advocacy to get that word of mouth going, particularly in these communities where word of mouth is so important where you use the power of your trusted circle and friends and family and really driving that. This morning, we also announced kind of the conclusion of our Friday Night 5G Lights program that we've been running in rural America over the last several months with big prize for one of the schools in Oklahoma. And driving those kinds of programs in addition to that and hometown grants is allowing us to speak to the community differently than we would normally do. All that's paying off. And as you can see in our overall results in terms of the actual switching and the results coming from switching and then building that Net Promoter Score that I was talking about just a few moments ago is what we've got to do to continue to drive years and years of growth. The distribution that we put into place, these are our stores. So we didn't go out and have fly-by night stores. We went and put our stores with our employees in these communities. And then, of course, within rural America for most of rural America, we brought the first 5G network and certainly the first 5G ultra capacity network to rural America. So we're really building some good momentum here and I think we have years and years of runway ahead of us.

Eric Luebchow

And I think one other thing that we often hear is that kind of perception sometimes lags reality in terms of network performance. And I know for many years, T-Mobile was viewed as a network that worked great in dense urban areas but was a little bit spottier when you move into these smaller markets. So maybe you could talk about where you're at in terms of network performance in the rural areas but also improving perception so that people realize, like actually, this is a premium network now sometimes that takes a little longer, right?

Jon Freier

Yes, exactly. So -- and we talked about this too at our Capital Markets Day, and I can provide a little bit more color here, is that when you look back in 10 to 15 years ago in terms of perception, we were way off. And the reason we were way off on perception is the reality is we were way off. We were a laggard in the 4G LTE era, way behind in terms of the network and the capability. And to your point, we had a good competitive network in the most -- the largest markets in the country. But certainly when you got into the suburbs and the ex-urban areas and the rural areas, it fell off dramatically. And so we have a well-earned reputation. We had a well earned reputation way back then and more value but questionable on the network. And then what we've done the last five years since we closed the acquisition of Sprint was to be able to build this incredibly powerful network and we brought 500,000 square miles of coverage in rural America. And what you're seeing from some of the statistics that we have is that when you look at network satisfaction within our customer base versus AT&Ts within their customer base and versus Verizon within their customer base, we were number three back in 2020 and now we're nipping at the heels of being number one in terms of network satisfaction with our own customers versus our competitors. It's great news because that's the reality. That's not perception that's the reality.

Then the flip side of that is the perception, okay, across switchers, how are switchers viewing network quality of T-Mobile versus others. We're up nearly 50%, 44% to be exact, up nearly 50% in network satisfaction improvement versus 2020. Our two principal competitors are down over that period of time. So that bodes well for us. And what we can do to continue to drive that? You're seeing messaging around the network, you're seeing utility continuing to improve around the network. But the more that we can do to center our messaging and overall customer outreach and convincing customers that you no longer have to trade off the network experience to get a great value. And by the way, that's the biggest Un-carrier move of all. No longer -- and this is the first time in the history of my time on this business, which is now 30 years, that you don't have to trade off value to get the best network. At T-Mobile, you get the best premium 5G network and the best value in this industry. That's the biggest Un-carrier move of all and I think that's what's really the thesis for driving our results and what you see.

Eric Luebchow

And in the metro markets, which have been, as you said, kind of the bread and butter for T-Mobile for a long time, your two largest peers have been actively upgrading their networks with a lot more mid-band spectrum and some of them put out stats around how they have better wireless penetration where they launch spectrum like C-band. So maybe you could talk about in the larger markets where all three carriers do have mid-band spectrum rolled out. Has there been any discernible impact in those markets to your results from that competitive factor?

Jon Freier

We believe our results speak for themselves. When you look at what I just described in smaller markets and rural areas and how we're growing there, the reality of that extends into the top 100 markets as well. And we look at where we're number one in share position, number two in share position or number three in share position, we have the majority of the top 100 markets where we're number two or number three. So we're only number one in, call it, 30%, 35% of the market. So we're number two or number three in the majority of these markets where we have more growth to go and get in these overall markets. But when you think about how we're growing where we're number one, or number two or number three, we're growing across those entire segments. And that's really related to what Ulf Ewaldsson has been talking about with everybody around extending our network lead, driving customer driven coverage, continuing to improve. We have this dense multi-layer 5G network that is just second to none. It's just not -- you can't compare it to anybody in these top 100 markets. And what we're doing around all the newest and the emerging technologies, whether that be AI-RAN, 5G advanced services, all of these things will continue to drive differentiation in the network and continue to extend our lead for years to come. We've been ahead of our competitors for the last three to four years and we're going to continue to remain ahead of our competitors for the next few years.

Eric Luebchow

One other thing we've seen this past year is that all the carriers have made some pricing adjustments or pricing optimization moves, or whatever you want to call them. One of your largest peers has been definitely by far the most aggressive. But it's interesting that we haven't seen a really big uptick in churn from these pricing adjustments that have been made over the last year, and that may be due to some structural factors that we talked about earlier. But maybe you could talk about whether that -- those moves by your peers give you more of a pricing umbrella to consider future pricing actions or do you feel pretty comfortable kind of being the value leader, you can drive better share gains in the market. How do you think about that dynamic?

Jon Freier

Yes. Our strategy is to be the value leader. And that's our covenant as a brand with our customers and that's what we're famous for and we're going to continue to be the value leader in the marketplace. We're going to defend that position and be the value leader. We haven't taken any decisions in terms of any other pricing actions but we remain flexible. If there's opportunities that we see, great, we'll explore that. But only if our brand covenant of being the value leader remains intact, that's the most important thing for us. Because the path to value creation for our company is not necessarily on pricing action, it's on account growth. That's where our service revenue differentiation, the growth that we have in service revenue will come from, not just by jacking people's prices up but providing great value, being famous for the value leader and drive an overall switching and account growth in our business.

Cathy Yao

And I guess to add on as a specific proof point to that in Q3, the primary driver of our ARPA and ARPU growth was customers continuing to self select up the rate plan to develop deeper relationships with us and take on more premium plans versus any other specific drivers.

Eric Luebchow

And I think you've also said that 65% of your new accounts are taking the Go5G plans, if I have that correct. And you have about 30% of your base now on these premium plans. Maybe you could talk about what you attribute that success to? Is it partially that you give the best device promotions for people who take these higher end plans or do you sense that customers are finding a lot of value in some of the perks that are embedded in those plans, whether they be Netflix or Apple TV or some of the other add-ons that you have?

Jon Freier

Yes. Go5G Plus and Go5G Next, these premium kind of value packed plans are our most popular plans in terms of when new accounts are switching to T-Mobile to your point, from an account perspective, 60 -- north of 60%. And it's really because of that. It's because of the incredible value that you get with the streaming services with a differentiated upgrade opportunity over two years versus what our competitors are generally doing at three years. Go5G Next, it's actually one year. So customers who want that flexibility to upgrade every single year have that option on Go5G Next. But the value that we pack into these devices and to these plans is really the driver for it. Now also, to your point, we do structure our device promotions across the rate card accordingly. The very best device deals that we give are on Go5G Next and Go5G Plus. And then we still give great deals but they're just not as discounted of deals on our essentials plans and some of the lower end starter plans. So that's definitely part of it. But what we see customers really interested in is what we are able to provide with Netflix, what we're able to provide with the Apple TVs, all those kinds of things that we can do, particularly for people.

If you guys -- I'm sure everybody has been traveling, airports are packed. What customers want within flight WiFi, everybody standing at their screen on the planes these days. That's making a difference. It really does make a difference. I'm in the airport a lot and I have my T-Mobile -- you know how T-Mobile people are. We just have our stuff all over the place. We wear our coats for nice investor conferences, but we're just kind of loud and proud. I dress like from head to toe in Magenta. And people are stopping me all the time to talk to me about T-Mobile and the reason why they love us, one, are great people and our great experience, two the value. But three, the perks, the perks that they get, particularly when I'm in airports, what they're getting with in-flight WiFi services and they just love it. And they just love it and being a part of it. So we're -- that's our story and that's kind of how we've driven that success. And like Cathy said just a few moments ago, it's really customers self selecting into it and craving it and one of the very best expression of 5G with the very best plan in the industry.

Eric Luebchow

Great. No, that's very helpful. So going back to the fiber topic, I think you've talked about 15 million-plus homes longer term with some of the fiber partnerships and JVs you've signed. Maybe you could talk about how that business will interact with your fixed wireless business, the potential overlap between your prospective fiber footprint and where you will have a big base of fixed wireless? Could you talk about whether there's any kind of cannibalization between those two businesses, whether they're really complementary?

Jon Freier

Yes. We see them as complementary businesses. They're two very different products. We see fixed wireless access as a mainstream use product. And you see fiber for much more higher consumptive of speeds are approaching gigabit download speeds and people that are using to the orders of magnitude a lot higher than what you get on fixed wireless and what we're typically seeing on fixed wireless. So we see them as very complementary products. Remember, we have -- fixed wireless as an excess capacity model. So we don't burden capital on fixed wireless, it's selling excess capacity. It's dynamic because it's always changing in terms of the capacity. We have 1 million people on a wait list right now for 5G broadband at T-Mobile, 1 million people that want to be a part of us but we don't have a slot open for them right here, right now based on where they live. And so that's 1 million people that are waiting. And when you think about -- this won't cross the entire 1 million people on a wait list when you think about 15 million homes passed, but any kind of demand that we can satisfy on a wait list get into fixed wireless product with the fiber product, that's great for our business. And then anybody that moves from a fixed wireless product into a fiber product creates capacity for more people who want a fixed wireless product. So we see this as a very complementary business and one that's going to be working together versus working against one another relative to the products.

Eric Luebchow

And I think one of the concerns when you launched fixed wireless was that it would have an impact on the mobile network experience. But I think you've talked about at your Capital Markets Day how not only have your fixed wireless speeds improved, your mobile speeds have improved as well. So maybe you could kind of talk about, take that misperception in the market about how it's chewing up excess capacity, how you really are building plenty into the future that you can satisfy both?

Jon Freier

Absolutely. You just said it in terms of like what our network team that's led that all, what they've been able to do to create capacity, increase supply for not only the mobile business but also the fixed wireless business. And you saw the overall number of customers that we planned, we took that up at the last Capital Markets Day, it's just been incredible. And the technologies these guys are using driving customer driven coverage and getting much more surgical and targeted in terms of coverage improvements is unlocking capacity improvements for us to continue to drive this business. So it's been something that has been very, very great for our business today but also something that we see as an opportunity to continue to create capacity tomorrow.

Eric Luebchow

Yes. And at your Capital Markets Day, obviously, AI has been one of the big buzzwords this year. You had some pretty cool guest speakers. I'm not going to lie, I'm not sure I understood everything they said. But maybe you could kind of break down and provide a little bit of color on the work you're doing using some of these generative AI technologies to help improve customer experience, reduce inbound call volumes and then ultimately, how that manifests into customer satisfaction longer term?

Jon Freier

Yes. And AI and all these buzz words have been exactly that. And what we try not to do is to go to conferences and come back and use buzz words just to hopefully impress people. We try not to do that. What we're trying to do is look at these technologies and actually make real world differences that improve the lives of our customers. So when you think about what Sam Altman talked about from OpenAI with IntentCX and our partnership there, we have billions of data points across tens of millions of customers that can help us improve their experience, that can help us improve their overall billing experience, that can help us improve their overall network experience, that can help us improve their overall kind of frontline human assisted experience. We have all this data that is incredible in a treasure trove of data that we haven't put to the best use just yet. We do a great job in this space as you can see with our churn rates, et cetera. But we have dreams about what we can go and do in a much bigger way, tailoring treatments to every single customers, making our messaging contextualized to our customers and improving the overall experience to our customer base on a person by person by person basis.

When you think about the churn rate that we have, Q3 was our lowest Q3 churn rate in the history of the company. But still, lots of people left this company given that we're a scale player of 128 million connections across our network. Even with the low churn rate and at what it is, that's still a lot of people leaving. So the more we can be surgical and thoughtful about every experience and curate a better experience for every single customer leveraging the promise of these technologies, we absolutely want to do that. And then what Jensen talked about from NVIDIA with AI-RAN that's another unlock for us in terms of how we can be smarter about leveraging the network and running the network and generating efficiency of the network and who knows potentially creating new businesses from this, that's still in front of us. But there's so much real interesting things that's happening here. And what I'm really excited about from a network perspective is Ulf and John saw and the entire team at NVIDIA, they're pioneering the way to think about networks in the next generation of technology and it's going to be exciting to see what unfolds.

Eric Luebchow

That's great. And one other factor in the customer experience equation is your T-Life app. So maybe you could talk about how that kind of plays into customer engagement, how that helps kind of reduce customer inbound call volumes and improved customer experience?

Jon Freier

Yes. We're -- basically, we're taking a large group of applications and consolidating them into the T-Life app, kind of a super app, if you will, to bring all the capability in the T-Life. You probably have already seen. We've already sunsetted the legacy T-Mobile app from the Apple App Store, the Google Play store, we've already sunsetted that and now you can only download T Life. But we've had the T-Life app, we've had a T-Mobile Tuesdays app, we've had a T-Mobile account management app, we've had sync-up product apps, and we're trying to bring all of that into one app. That is going to increasingly be the epicenter of how we do business at T-Mobile where it's really kind of promoting empowerment for customers to be able to take care of things when they want to versus when they must in terms of when a store is open or when a call center is available, belonging in terms of really helping them understand all the benefits that they have and then being able to manage their full suite of connections to the network, whether that be their smartphone connection, tablet, watches high speed Internet from their home, being able to do all of that within T-Life is our dream.

And what we've seen already so far, we said we're going to see 40 million downloads by the end of this year, we're on pace for that. But what we've seen during the iPhone 16 preorder environment that for the first time in the history of our company, the majority of those preorders happened digitally. They were actually up almost 50% year-over-year. And so customers being able to easily upgrade their device and we reengineered all of these constructs in terms of making it easier, easier promotional constructs and being able to get an upgrade done in basically three minutes or less, and that's so much more easier for our customer. And when you think about convenience, convenience isn't like a whole bunch more stores. Convenience is making it great and easy for customers right here on our smartphones, that's what the convenience is all about and that's what we're trying to do.

Eric Luebchow

And I think we're running low on time here. But one of the other acquisitions that doesn't get talked about as much is you have a pending acquisition of UScellular, their mobile business, you also acquired some of their spectrum assets. So maybe, first of all, you could maybe talk a little bit about the regulatory process there and how that's looking into next year? We obviously have a change in administration, which might somewhat influence that. But also how it helps you in terms of reach into secondary, tertiary markets given that's where they typically operate?

Jon Freier

Yes. We're excited about this UScellular transaction. It's still in regulatory review and we're going to continue to work with UScellular through the regulatory review process. I don't have a specific update on that. But what I'm excited about is that this is one of those rare transactions that's so great for customers. What I mean by that is that UScellular customers will have access to lower prices and more value as a result of this transaction. And then UScellular customers will get an access to a better network as well as the entire customer base of T-Mobile getting access to a better network. And while we've done all kinds of great things in rural America, we have so much more that we can go do. When you think about -- 40% to 50% of UScellular's assets are in rural America and there's so much more we can go do when you combine these two networks together. And one of these transactions that's going to bring more competition, more choice, lower prices, more value and better networks, I'd tell you when I think once you go through this regulatory process and everybody understands the merits of this case, we're confident in the approval of the overall transaction. So something that we're very excited about that we hope to see closed in 2025.

Eric Luebchow

All right. Well, John and Cathy, thank you for joining us today. We'll wrap it there. Appreciate your time.

Jon Freier

Thank you, Eric.