Okay, everyone. I'm John Hodulik, the Media Intelligence Analyst here at UBS, and I'm very happy to introduce our next speaker, Mike Sievert, the President and CEO of T-Mobile. Mike, thanks for being here.
Thanks, John.
We were just talking about the analyst day you conducted about a month ago. With all that knowledge, can you just give us a sense for what the company's priorities are if you just look out into 2025?
Yeah, thanks. I hope most people tuned in. We only do this once every three, three and a half years or so. We had a lot of fun with it. And what we said then was that we're on a multi-year course to really reshape this company. We called it our Challenger to Champion Transformation Plan. And what that basically means is further extending our network leadership, which will be a huge piece for 2025, further extending our value leadership, which you'll see down payments on that, and transforming how we serve customers using data, AI, digitalization so that this customer love that's always been what sets T-Mobile apart gets transferred into the modern era so that we can use the data that we have to serve customers in profound new ways the way they expect to be served.
Ultimately, it's basically about transferring the heroic work our people do to solve problems for customers into a new kind of heroism, which is, could we just prevent those problems in the first place? That's where our passions are.
Makes sense. Before we adjust the number of these issues, if we could drill down a little bit, how was Black Friday for T-Mobile and the industry in your view? And say, how would you compare it to last year?
Wouldn't be a UBS conference.
No.
Unless you asked me about Black Friday and get an.
Yeah, how we start.
A non-answer like you've been getting all day. The good news is we recently re-guided, just a few weeks ago and said we'd be at three million or so postpaid net adds. I can tell you that that's looking, we're very confident in that. It's been a great quarter so far. The only thing I would caution, and I can, I can just hear myself saying this in prior years as well, is that this quarter's back-end loaded. So while I'm here to tell you it's going great, we're confident in our guidance, investors should be cautious because there's a lot of risk in the back half. Most of this quarter is still in front of us, if you will, because the shaping of Q4 is a little different than most quarters. But we feel great about it.
Gotcha. And there's a lot of worries among shareholders about the whether or not the growth that we've seen in the wireless industry is sustainable. So how are you positioned, and is the company positioned as, you know, were we actually to see sort of fewer net adds going into 2025, 2026?
Yeah. I'm always a little surprised by this question because it almost presumes. We get this a lot, and so I'm glad you're asking 'cause it expresses what is on people's mind. And it almost presumes there's sort of gonna be some big secular shift happening. And I've been asked this for years now, and it's just kinda not happening. What, what's interesting is that if there's been a slowdown in sort of low-calorie net adds that don't really make a difference, what hasn't happened, what has not happened is a slowdown in switching. In fact, switching's higher than it was three years ago. Like, port volumes in the industry are higher than three years ago and flat from a year ago. So switching is where T-Mobile plays, and switching is as robust as ever.
And, you know, our strategy is to profitably, systematically take share at a predictable, reliable pace, no big flash in the pan. That's what people have come to expect from us: reliable, predictable, profitable, value-creating growth that's thoughtful and at a certain pace. And that's something that we see in this current environment, you know, should not be a problem.
That's interesting. So port volumes are higher. Can you talk a little bit about porting ratios? I mean, are you taking more than you were, say, 12 months or two years ago? And is it really a function of everything you talked about, the Analyst Day, sort of the price-value sort of relationship?
Yeah. I mean, in any given week, it bounces around a little bit. But the broad trend is we're share takers. You know, if you look at Q3 in this very environment that you're asking about to express questions that, you know, I know you, you feel, remember Q3 of 2024, the one we just reported, was a decade-long record for T-Mobile in postpaid phone net additions and an all-time record for a Q3 in churn. I mean, that, that was a great Q3. And it's in the environment that people are, you know, quote-unquote, worried about might be a slowdown. So you can kinda see that our strategy went, you know, is to have a value proposition, a network proposition that are noticeable, noticeably superior to customers, and to have a marketing and distribution operation that's sophisticated enough to reach the right audience with that message.
And that's what we systematically do quarter after quarter in a reliable way. Sorry to be boring, but, you know.
Yeah.
That's, that's part of the job.
It makes it easy. Can we talk about upgrades a little bit? And then we'll talk about some of the segments that you guys are going after. But obviously, you know, there's a scare that we would see higher upgrades with the, with the new iPhone. Didn't happen. Do you think that the, the current rate of upgrades that we, that we're seeing are sustainable? And is that good or bad for T-Mobile?
Well, that's the funny question 'cause you said there was a scare that upgrades might be higher. And so we have, like, some signal coming in from people like, "Why are your upgrades so low? Isn't that a problem?" And others that are worried upgrades might take off. And so, you know, you know, for us, it's about meeting the customer where they are. Remember, 80% of our customers have 5G-capable phones. They're experiencing speeds and performance on our network that are on average twice what they could get from our competitors nationwide, across all network types, 4G and 5G on average. And so, they're having a great experience, and therefore, you know, the upgrade rate is, is pretty low. And yet we're meeting the need. Remember, Q3 churn was the lowest Q3 ever in our history.
To those that say, "Wow, are you being stingy with upgrades?" Well, no. I mean, customers, our customers love our upgrade programs, and you can see that in our numbers.
But do you think when upgrade rates or if upgrade rates move up, say, this time next year with a new form factor on the iPhone, does that sort of lead to higher churn and potentially lower profitability?
The dynamic that would cause that would also cause more switching. So go right back to two questions ago.
Yeah.
Is switching vibrant? Is it vital? T-Mobile feeds on switching. And so a cycle of phones that causes everybody to act that we, you know, is of a scale we haven't seen recently, would probably drive some upgrade volume, but it would also drive an awful lot of people asking themselves, "Do I have the right provider?" And that's always a great moment for T-Mobile.
So, some areas where you have been growing nicely and you laid out again at your analyst day was the rural markets and the business markets. Can you give us an update on sort of where, where you think those numbers can go over the next couple of years? I mean, how far are we in terms of, you know, attacking those opportunities at T-Mobile?
At least to our current win share, maybe higher. It's all I've, you know, people ask me, "What's your fair share?" And I always wonder, like, how do you answer that exactly? I mean, what is a fair share? You know, or what we have the best value and the best network. You know, what's the quote-unquote fair share? It's hard to answer. I mean, there are markets where we're, you know, where we really have a vibrant market share. Our win share in Q3 was an all-time high in smaller markets in rural areas and way above our market share, which shows we have years and years to, I mean, many years to run of share taking in these markets without some secular change, just executing our strategy systematically, profitably, thoughtfully, winning customers. And that's wonderful.
That's even before the effects of digitalization, which open up new opportunities, etc. So we're really excited about what's happening in smaller markets in rural areas, which again, you know, in our definition is 40% of the country. So this isn't just small towns. This is everything that's not the top 100 cities. And, so it's really nice. We're very happy with the strategy and with our performance there. In enterprise, the story is equally as exciting. You know, again, our market share's quite low, tons of room to run, but present win share is much higher than market share. And of course it is because in the enterprise sector, we're not facing the same kind of headwinds on reputation. I mean, let's face it, we're only a few years into T-Mobile being the best network. Most Americans, you know, would still answer it's somebody else.
I mean, we're still, you know, the winning the reputation game with consumers, that's a tailwind on our business. That's still in front of us. But with businesses, they check out 100 phones from all the providers, and they study them for weeks, and then our win share is at historic highs. And so that's a great tailwind for us because enterprises see it today. We unveiled at that Capital Markets Day you talked about T-Priority. It's a groundbreaking new service, the first-ever 5G dedicated slice for first responders that modernizes, you know, the way wireless companies can serve a separate service for first responders. We designed it, you know, with big, big organizations like the City of New York in mind. And that's, you know, just another tailwind on our enterprise and government business.
Makes sense. Maybe now turn it to ARPU. How should we think about trends in ARPU and ARPA? Just given the competitive environment and maybe along with that, there's been a number of, you know, pricing actions in 2024. Do you think the competitive situation is such that we should expect to see similar activity in 2025?
Well, it's growing. You know, our ARPA, you know, we signaled a 3% growth, ongoing growth through the planning horizon, multi-year planning horizon. You know, and that's the metric we obsess about more because it looks at the total relationship of the account, so it's nice to see. And as we've talked about in the past, generally speaking, the trend for us is that customers are buying up our rate card because they want more of what T-Mobile has to offer. And that is just, that is a wonderful place to be. They see the inherent value in Go5G Next and Go5G Plus with loading above 60% on those premium rate plans. And yet the base is still only at 30% and rapidly growing. And so lots of room to run in the base. The flow has been maintained.
Of course, you know, from time to time, in order to keep up with the times, we've made changes to the base as well. We executed on the premise of your question a set of changes, first time in a decade in 2024 for some customers. We didn't reach everybody with that. So there's, you know, potential for more room to run with that same initiative, meaning we didn't even reach people on the same rate plans. You know, we just partly did it. But generally, our strategy is going to be around focusing on value within our rate card, not changing the rate card. You know, we'll be smart and thoughtful, but that's generally the approach. So far, so good. You know, it's working really well for us.
Yeah. So how should we think about the, the wholesale market? Obviously, you have some, some pressure from ACP that you guys called out and potentially from Boost coming off the network. And I think you, you guys called that out as a, as a maybe as a headwind for, for 2025. Is, is the wholesale market in general, maybe outside of those two issues, a potential source of growth for the company as we look out to, to 2026?
Yeah. Thanks for asking it that way. We tried to parse the two things. You've got some one-timers happening in the very near term. You know, Verizon buying TracFone that will finally, you know, begin to come off. You know, Dish, we always designed that partnership with the idea in mind that they would build their own network and that some of that volume would come off. And so those are kinda headwinds to revenues that are on a one-time basis next year, and we guide it accordingly. But the underlying trends are really good. I mean, of course they are. Think about the, you know, kinda broad picture.
You've got. There's been acquisitions of MVNOs by major providers, which just opens up entrepreneurial opportunities for, you know, people that have seen what happened in the past and they see now market potential because the, you know, the major three networks own most of the prior MVNOs. So entrepreneurism is, you know, fueled by that. And also, big companies see opportunity in our space as well. Some are celebrities are inspired by what we did with Ryan Reynolds and Mint. And so there's all kinds of, you know, entrepreneurial interest from organizations large and small. Social media influencers create a lot of opportunity. So, it's a grow the underlying trend, absent those two big partners, is a growth trend for us. And, you know, we would expect that to continue through the planning period.
Gotcha. Maybe shifting to the broadband strategy, and maybe first we'll start with fixed wireless. Obviously, solid driver of growth, new guidance for it was 12 million subs in 2028, I believe it was. Just how do you, as you look maybe even beyond the 2028 and the guidance you gave, is that a product that you think could continue to grow just given the demand that consumers have in terms of speeds and payload?
Before we get to continue to grow, let's sort of deal with the kinda bear question, which is, is it here to stay?
Right.
The answer is absolutely yes. I'm always surprised at the questions because, you know, some say, "Well, right, but I mean, demand for speed and capacity is increasing, and therefore you're a moment in time technology." That kind of misses the fact that wireless technology is improving at least the rate that demand is increasing. Look in the rearview mirror, for example. I mean, the average wireless consumer in the United States is experiencing four times quadruple the speed of just 2019, just five years ago, 4x faster. That's not T-Mobile. I mean, we're twice as fast as our competitors. That's on average across wireless.
Right.
We're not stopping. Look at T-Mobile. We only have 60% of our mid-band spectrum deployed on 5G. We only have 60% so far. We have lots of room to run just within our portfolio. You heard us talk at our Capital Markets Day about our interest in advancements in the technology. We're already laying the groundwork for the next wave of technology that will further extract performance from every capital dollar and every band of frequency. That's our job, get more and more performance out of every capital dollar and every band of frequency. We're not sitting around on our hands. I mean, we're actually doing the doing that will bring about that future. So, of course, we're gonna get to the 12 million. This business is here for the long haul.
Now, the question is, can we go past 12 million? It's too soon to say. You know, we were cautious last time. We talked about 7 million-8 million for many years, and we only recently updated it to 12. And we did that once we knew we could get there without a change in our business model. Our business model for fixed wireless focuses on fallow capacity, a network we've built principally for mobile. It was paid for by mobile. And we find the pockets all over the country where no normal amount of mobile usage will take up our capacity. And only in those places do we approve an applicant for home broadband. Our 12 million plan sticks with that.
Gotcha.
We're open-minded about whether or not we would have a capital burden to plan, but it would have to be a profitable one, and so far, you know, it looks to us a better strategy to focus on the fallow capacity model, at least for this planning horizon through 2028.
But beyond the 12 million, would you need capital to drive beyond the 12 million?
It depends. People ask that about seven to eight, and we just unveiled to you it's 12.
Right.
Because things improved. CPEs got better. We got better at utilizing spectrum. We more advanced carrier aggregation techniques than what we were planning on. So 5G didn't stand still. It got better, and we improved it to 12. Can we pull that off again? I don't know. It's too early to say. Or will we find a capital-burdened technology that actually works, meaning where you can get a great return? Too early to say, but we're on the hunt.
Got it. Okay. Now, maybe we'll switch over to fiber. You at your analyst day, you also unveiled 12 million-15 million passings. Is that the right number? Could you do more, or just how should we think of, especially in an age where, you know, your competitors are talking a lot about convergence, you know, versus AT&T and Verizon? That would give you a smaller footprint. Is that something that sort of worries you as convergence becomes more into focus?
It only gives us a smaller footprint by some measures. Like, for example, why do we talk about passings? We talk about passings to try to get a handle on how big the customers will be, right? How, what the customer count will be. So let's do, like, a passings equivalent. Let's start with that 12 million on fixed wireless. 12 million customers, not passings. So if you just do kinda typical fiber math, let's say, you know, fiber companies shoot for better than 40% penetration. 12 million customers then is like having 30 million or 35 million passings. It's passings equivalent of 30 million or 35 million passings. Add 12 million- 15 million to that, you're already knocking at the door of 50 million passings equivalent in this plan.
And we signaled that, we're in this business to build great products for customers and make a fair return. And in a world where we can make a fair or great return, we have some ongoing appetite in this space. We're not doing it to defend our wireless business, but we do think we have a lot of permission to win in this category and make money. And therefore, if the right opportunities present themselves at the right valuations with some limits, you know, with limited ongoing appetite, but some ongoing appetite to round out that number a bit.
Makes sense, and you have a number of pilot markets going, and you're right. I think in general, fiber to the home companies talk about 40% penetration. How do you think of that, from T-Mobile's perspective? Obviously, your, your end, your Net Promoter Scores are very high, highest in the sort of connectivity business. You're, you know, you're obviously, as you, as you said, you know, the ports are coming your way.
I mean, do you think, as you look at these 12 million- 15 million homes, that you can do that? That is, is T-Mobile, I don't think you laid it out at your analyst day, but is 40% your goal, or do you think you guys can do better than 40%? Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you've seen in some of your pilot markets already, but do you think you can do better than 40%?
Yeah. It's too soon in the pilot markets 'cause you typically, you know, achieve full penetration after a while.
Yeah.
But the early curves look very promising. And, you know, look, it's hard to say. We put out the thesis that said we believe that the terminal penetration for T-Mobile would be noticeably higher than for a pure standalone no-name fiber company, that kinda creates a fiber company that's regional in nature and is only known for that and has no other business, that it ought to be noticeably higher.
Makes sense. Yeah.
The other commercial benefit is that we ought to achieve that penetration noticeably more cost-effectively, right? That, if you think about it in a wireless business, look, the biggest things are the cost to acquire customers, the cost to retain customers, and the cost to build networks. The network piece, you know, is done by a win-win partnership. Attracting and retaining customers is a core competence of our company with not just know-how, but billions of dollars of embedded investments made over years that make us one of the best in the world at this. We, you know, the thesis is that'll translate into value creation in an adjacency this close.
Makes sense. Now, your strategy is unique in that you're working with a number of smaller companies on this strategy. We have the Metronet deal and the Lumos deal, you know, still not closed. But Metronet, you gave some data, I think at your analyst day, that they're cranking along in terms of homes passed. They're, but does it create some risk working with these sort of some of the smaller guys, instead of just sort of doing it yourself, which there, there's some negatives to that too and from a cash flow and, you know, standpoint and others. But does it change the risk profile that you're working with some of these smaller guys that don't, maybe they don't have a history of some of the bigger guys in terms of building?
For now, I love the risk profile because, you know, remember, we're 50/50 partners, so we've got a lot to say.
Yeah.
And we're 50/50 partners with fantastic companies that also have other investments and can leverage those learnings all around the world. EQT and KKR are two partners in these acquisitions. These acquisitions are some of the best-run companies in the space. We went after kinda the A+ assets, that are building high-quality businesses, you know, meeting and beating their promises, and to your point, growing faster than people expect. At a smaller scale, by the way, Lumos is growing a lot faster than people expected, than even we expected in our merger deal. And then Metronet is the single fastest growing standalone kinda privately held fiber asset. And so, you know, call it the, you know, PE-backed assets, so the ones that aren't, you know, overlaying copper. And so that's great. That's a great place to be.
That allows us to have aspirations like we expressed, 12 million-15 million, along with the wholesale partnerships that we've struck and you know, possibly have room for some ambition around those numbers because the teams are that strong.
Is there room, because there are a lot of, a lot of even private equity-backed, you know, independent fiber to the home companies? Is there room to do other deals like you've done with Metronet or Lumos or even smaller deals with other companies that you've worked with in the past and in some of these other markets?
Yeah. I kinda hit that a second ago when I was saying there's ongoing appetite. It's limited, and we're gonna be smart about it. We feel like one of the things I think partners appreciate about us is we're interested in win-wins. You know, to us, it's not a win if we kind of extracted value out of a partnership and, you know, we're the only ones making money. We want partnerships though where we look back on it several years later and we were like, "Yeah, we were smart. We were patient. We were thoughtful." And I'm proud of the ones we've struck because some were expecting, I mean, I was asked for fiber for like two straight years before we did these deals.
I was like, "Look, time will, time will, prove us right." And these are fantastic transactions. And if another one at a certain size, again, our appetite is there but limited, presents itself where it's a real win-win and where we think we can make a great return, we're open-minded. And to your point, there's several constructs. We could strike a new partnership. We could own an asset outright. We could utilize one of these two instruments, in the partnerships with KKR and EQT. We're open-minded about that, as long as we're smart about it. And one of the things I like about these constructs is that we're essentially putting our brand to work. Remember, this is all about putting our brand to work and those assets we've spent years and billions on, for about 1/5 the dollars. Why do I say that?
Well, our one equity dollar is being matched by another partner's equity dollar, 50/50 partnership. And then that entity is, you know, can be levered up to 3x . And so you get up to $5 of, you know, investment, but the brand is T-Mobile. You know, the go-to-market is T-Mobile.
Right. Maybe last question on the topic, convergence. It's something we're hearing a lot about now. What's your view on convergence? You know, aside from just bundling the products together, but does it create economic value? I'm not sure. In our view, the work we've done, I think the jury's still out. In other words, does one plus one equal three in putting these services? And you know, and we hear that it, you know, from a lot of companies that it does in terms of lower churn or overall lower costs. But just your overall view on sort of the economic value creation of convergence.
Sure. Well, first, our view on convergence is that it's here and it's been here for years. It's been here for at least five years. And that the version of it that you see is the version of it you're gonna see. In other words, people who are worried about a Europe-style convergence or something like that are kinda missing the movie that it's already happened here. The typical American consumer, 80%-85% of American consumers have been able to buy their wireless and their broadband from the same provider for over five years. It's not new. They've had these choices. By the way, it's not driving their choice to a fan a great extent. It's kind of in the run rate. Cable has made a what looks to me like a viable and successful business in this space. It's fully in the run rate.
You know, all of our success over the last half-decade has been with that happening, and we expect it to continue to happen. Good for them. But it's here. And so, there's not like a big shoe about to drop. And why do I say that? You know, some of our competitors talk about things like, "Well, we're investing in fiber because we have more share and more success where we have fiber." And then we went and looked at that and said, "Well, that's interesting." Where they have fiber, our two principal competitors have fiber. T-Mobile also has more success where they have fiber. We have, you know, higher growth rates. We have penetration, at least what's there in the non-fiber markets. And we're picking up household penetration. Where Verizon says they have lower churn, well, they have fiber.
T-Mobile has lower churn where Verizon has fiber. And so you have to be cautious about kinda the causality. There are places where customers have an affinity, they spend more and they have an affinity for this category. And that's, you know, some of the places where our competitors have fiber. So, you know, look, I think both of these categories in the U.S. are a considered purchase. People will pick the broadband as we're seeing with T-Mobile's remarkable success in broadband, fastest growing by far for several years now. They will make a broadband choice that meets their needs for their house. And in wireless, they will make a wireless choice that meets the need for their house. And if those two come from the same company, wonderful.
And by the way, if you ask people in a survey, would it be good if those two come from the same company? And if 70% say, "Yeah, yeah, sure." That's not like actually indicating that that's our future. Like people are, "Why not? Yeah." I mean, think about yourself as a consumer. I mean, does this really motivate your purchase? Like, in other words, a decade ago, we were writing checks. Do you write checks? Like, do you write, like, get a paper bill and write a check? No. So, I mean, the broadband's on autopay, the wireless is on autopay. Both these categories mean a lot to you. You're gonna make the best choice for you in both of those. And that's why we're building the best broadband business we can and the best mobile business we can.
Makes sense. All right. Couple, you know what? Let's, why don't we skip to, a couple of questions about some acquisitions you guys have done. First of all, Mint Mobile, obviously massive growth at Mint, you know, from when you guys announced the deal until you closed it. Just what does that do for your company? First of all, I'd say, how would you rate that acquisition, the performance of the company since you've agreed to acquire it, and then just your overall view of the prepaid market inside of T-Mobile?
You might not be surprised. I'm gonna say it's going great.
Yeah.
But that's 'cause it's going great.
Yeah.
So the company has, in the two years since we first announced that partnership, the company has outperformed all of our expectations. What's interesting is since we've joined, I can tell you, it's a little counterintuitive, but I can tell you that the principal way it's helping our P&L is it's actually helping us grow our postpaid business. You know why? Because it's taking pressure off the prepaid business, which gives us financial firepower to continue investing in postpaid switching. Here's what's happening. There's this. We feel like, given that we're the, you know, market leader in prepaid, we need to keep growing prepaid at very modest rates, and we've been doing that for years. We're number one in the space, and yet we're still growing. Usually, that's not the case. When you're number one, you get toppled and you start going backwards.
We saw that in postpaid with our competitors. We've been number one for a while. We're holding on to that position, and we, but let's face it, the nth amount of growth you get in the prepaid market is not the most productive stuff. And that's been true since the beginning of time. Having a brand new segment that Mint is going after, totally new customers, new brand, new way of marketing, all digital, it just takes the pressure off. So now you get, you don't have to go for that nth piece of less productive on our traditional prepaid brands, which, what's that do? It gives us the financial wherewithal to plow that money into postpaid instead. And that's what we've been doing the last couple of quarters.
And then, second acquisition I want to talk about is UScellular. Just how should we, what does the assets you're getting with UScellular do for the company?
Again, one of the core strategies is smaller markets in rural areas. This is just a big step forward in those areas. It's actually material when you look at it from the point of view of that denominator. What's gonna result here, first of all, is a better network for T-Mobile and USc ellular customers. I mean, that's a win-win. You've seen this movie before at a larger scale when we brought T-Mobile and Sprint together. This is about combining the network assets and the spectrum, most of the spectrum, and putting it to work in a denser, better network for both customer bases. That's just a win-win. We are gonna put the T-Mobile rate card on offer for every single US cellular customer, which means lower prices.
So I don't know how many mergers you've heard of in the past that are like, "Yeah, I can promise you better networks and lower prices right from the get-go." And the company, of course, will benefit from the synergies and, you know, it's, it's highly accretive. So this is gonna be a win all the way around, and I'm confident the government will see it that way as well.
One question about the network. I mean, one of the things you said earlier talking about the fixed wireless business is only about 60% of the spectrum has been deployed for 5G at this point. Where are we in terms of the 2.5 deployment, C-band? I don't, you know, I don't know if you guys have started to deploy that yet. Just, and then maybe some commentary on what happened, what do you think eventually happens to the 800 MHz spectrum?
Okay. Well, first on mid-band, you know, we're, what we said at our Capital Markets Day is that we, having achieved 5G network leadership in this country, do not intend to defend it and maintain it. We intend to further extend it. And so our plan over the next several years is about further extending that network lead because we have so much firepower left on the table. We have advanced technologies that have been able to get more performance out of every band of spectrum that we're way ahead on, and we have lots of spectrum we haven't put into the fight yet. And that's gonna be great for consumers and businesses. And so there's lots of room to run there. We haven't deployed, in any significant way, C-band yet. We've only deployed 60% overall of our mid-band spectrum onto 5G.
We have lots of 4G refarming still to go. 80% of our devices are 5G capable now, so lots of just great things that can come together there, and remember, we have a different approach. By having a 5G core, we are able to have a multi-layer 5G strategy with multiple carriers of 5G aggregated. That allows us to favor the low band for the uplink, the mid-band for the downlink, aggregate all those into one connection, and it makes the circle, the diameter around any tower, we have a more dense grid than our competitors, but the circle around the more dense grid is actually bigger, and that allows you to have better quality reach out to the edges.
And so that's why we have 5G availability at several times our competitors and won, just again from Opensignal this last quarter, the most available 5G network in the world. That's what proportion of the total time do you get 5G instead of alternate technologies. So, fantastic place to be and room to run. 800. Don't know. You know, we finished the auction. We complied with the consent decree. We informed the government. Everybody's satisfied as far as we know. And so now it's just an option. We do not have 800 in our network capacity management planning. Should we roll it out, it would be an additional benefit for our customers. We do not have proceeds from selling the 800 in the financial plans we unveiled to you last month or two months ago.
So, should we sell it? That would be found money that we can invest for the benefit of our customers, and we're hard at work figuring out what's next.
Great. And just wrapping it all up here, you know, we touched on a lot of different aspects of the business, but what would you say are the sort of core elements within T-Mobile that ensure that you'll be able to hit the guidance that you laid out and maintain that number one role in terms of the largest, not just wireless company in the U.S. or the fastest growing wireless company in the U.S., but connectivity company in the U.S.?
A couple of things. One is continuing this Un-carrier strategy around best network and best value. And best value in many senses is about this kind of full relationship of a connected life. And you see that with people. Our best value is in a world where most people are buying way up our rate card because they want the T-Mobile connected life. And the best network, you know, we've spent a lot of time talking about. As an overlay to these things, our challenger to champion plan is about transforming our company into a deeply data-informed, AI-enabled, digital-first company. And we are not a company that, like, you know, basically comes home from Davos and says AI words on TV.
Like, in other words, we're a company that's deeply thoughtful about, not how do we wring out customer service cost and OpEx, but how do we serve customers better? How do we translate our love for customers that's always been the hallmark of our brand into a hybrid human-digital relationship and putting data at the center so we can actually solve their problems at scale before it ever occurs to them they have problems? And this is just a giant opportunity for us that not only in our core wireless business, but to continue extending into adjacencies. Let me finish with an example. We talked about T-Life being the centerpiece of our digital transformation. And by the time we unveiled T-Life to you, we were on our way. We're now past 40 million downloads.
And so this is, like, last week in the App Store, we were number six. We were number one in lifestyle, number six. We had more downloads than TikTok last week. We're on this rapid growth curve. And people come to T-Life not just to check their bill, but to receive their rewards, their T-Mobile Tuesdays, their Magenta Status, to learn about, you know, how they can take advantage of being a member at T-Mobile. And that's the beginnings of something truly special and great that will inform our transformation over these next three years.
Sounds good. We'll leave it right there, Mike. Thanks for being here.
John, appreciate it. Good to see you. Thanks, everybody.