Well, good afternoon. For those on our streaming site, welcome back to Citi's 2023 Communications, Media, and Entertainment Conference. For those of you I haven't met, I'm Michael Rollins, and I cover communications services and infrastructure for Citi Research. Before we get started, I'd like to mention that we do have disclosures available at the registration desk and on the Citi Velocity page from which you're streaming the audio. We're also gonna look to incorporate your questions in today's discussion. If you're here with us today, we have a microphone in the back, and if you raise your hand, you know, later during our discussion, we'll try to get that to you. If you're streaming, you can enter the questions directly into the box on the page. We're gonna continue the tradition of using live surveys.
They're completely anonymous. We're just gonna share the full aggregation of the responses, and you can access that here with the QR codes that you can see on the placards and on the boards here. On the site, it should come up as we're discussing the live polls, and you can enter your responses that way. With all of that out of the way, I'd like to welcome back Peter Osvaldik, CFO of T-Mobile. Peter, thanks for being with us.
Mike, it's just such a pleasure to be back here again and, you know, looking forward to the conference, what a beautiful place. Let me start with the legalese. You know, today I may make forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties and refer to our SEC filings as well as non-GAAP metrics, all the reconciliations are there for you. With that out of the way, I'm just excited to get to discuss 2023 and beyond.
You've got some news out after the close. We'll get to that in just a moment. Before we get there, though, just set us up at a high level in terms of how T-Mobile is thinking about the strategic and operating priorities for 2023 and how they might be different than 2022.
Really, it's a continuation of what we've been doing to date, Mike. That is to continue to drive industry-leading customer growth and doing it in a profitable, accretive way. When you kind of double-click down on that, the first stage in that is continuing this Un-carrier journey that we've been on of being able, for the first time ever in this industry, to bring in the same company, the best network and the best value, and drive that proposition in. Of course, that starts with the network, and we're gonna continue the evolution. You know, we've been ahead on 5G for quite a bit of time now. That's gonna continue to be a durable 5G lead. What's more and more interesting is as 5G becomes the G, that 5G network leadership is translating into overall network leadership.
We're gonna continue on that journey much as we have been in 2023. The second is really working on our differentiated growth opportunities. You've heard us talk about these time and time again. We're gonna continue to focus in on those. That's top 100 network seekers. You know, for the first time ever, because of this network being able to drive network seekers to T-Mobile, even in the markets where we have a leading market share because of the value proposition that we've been able to bring over many years. Second is smaller markets in rural areas. You know, 40% of the population where we've made significant inroads and will continue to work there. T-Mobile for Business.
I'm excited to, you know, dive a little bit deeper into all of these, but has been on a great journey, and Q4 had another great set of results for T-Mobile for Business. Of course, fixed wireless or high-speed internet, as we like to call it, where we delivered yet again in Q4, you know, tremendous adds right at the pace that we want it to be and will continue into 2023. The last, really the last piece of the integration in 2023, to be able to set up not only what we think will be the world's most successful telecommunications merger in history, but to be able to get to full synergy run rate in 2024. That's really it.
Great. Let's jump into the fourth quarter results. You shared some metrics. You know, maybe share some highlights and maybe give some context of what drove your performance during the fourth quarter.
Yeah. Well, it continues to be, as I said, at the highest level, it is the ability to bring the best network and the best value. Bringing those together, as well as leveraging these under-penetrated markets that we have, is what drove the growth. What's interesting, at a high level, the industry, certainly Q4 to Q4. In 2022, we've started to see some of the normalization from those very high peak levels of growth in 2021. We saw that happen in Q3, certainly, based on consensus for everybody and our own internal projections. We'll see a continued decline in net add growth vis-à-vis Q4 of 2021 and Q4 of this year. Despite all that, what we just delivered in Q4 was actually our highest postpaid phone additions since the merger.
927,000 postpaid phone net additions for the quarter. 1.8 million total postpaid connections. We'll get into how important in the era of 5G is growth beyond just postpaid phone. 314,000 net account additions. Remember the true measure of switching. We delivered yet another tremendous quarter there. 524,000 high-speed internet connections. Continuing on the journey that has just, you know, really taken off this year in a phenomenal way.
There was questions as we were exiting the fourth quarter, whether inventory constraints of smartphones would hold back sales in the quarter. Did you see any of that? Is there some spillover effect that investors should expect for T-Mobile in the first quarter?
Yeah. Certainly what we saw was during the quarter, I mean, well documented, you know, some shortages and issues with some of the higher-end handsets. By the time you got towards the end of the quarter, we saw a lot of that normalize. Did it probably have a little bit of impact? You know, being the switcher taker in the industry probably impacts us more than perhaps others. In the period of the quarter, maybe there was a little bit of an impact. I don't anticipate there was a lot of spillover because a lot of that got healthy by the end of the quarter.
Things of backlogs and those types of things are more normal.
More normalized now, yeah.
You know, how do you rate the overall quality of the volume? Like, if you look at the rate plan mix on, you know, Magenta MAX, and you look at it relative to the last few quarters or what's in the base, can you help us appreciate the quality of these ads coming in?
Yeah. Well, that's just such a fundamental aspect of how we approach every single quarter. As I said, all year, and what our priority continues to be into 2023 is not only driving industry-leading growth but also making sure that that's done in a profitable, accretive way. Every single quarter, you can drive more gross adds and hence more net adds, but you're doing it at much less CLV on a per customer basis. That's not our goal. Our goal is always, this is the growth that we wanna deliver and make sure that we're doing it in a very accretive, profitable way. That's how we approach Q4 as well. Certainly being able to deliver, you know, a now record Q4 postpaid phone churn number helped that number and helped that balance as well. That's how we think about the growth.
Magenta MAX continues to be tremendously strong. In Q3, we talked about of new accounts coming in, it was at above 60%, near to above 60%. That continues into Q4. You know, in terms of the base, in Q3, we were just shy of 20%, and we'll disclose, you know, more towards earnings. We continue to see strength. One of the interesting things, we launched a four for 100 promotion. What we saw there is exactly what we thought we would see. It drove incremental traffic to the digital properties into the stores. Once people got into the stores and once their consideration is set and they see the value prop of the network and the value prop of Magenta MAX, we saw tremendous conversion into higher tier rate plans.
In fact, that four for $100 mix loading, that represented less than 1% of our activations in Q4. You just saw how people came in. It drove the traffic, drove the demand, the interest, but then stepped up into higher tier rate plans.
Are you ready for our first survey question?
Absolutely.
First survey question coming up. How many postpaid phone subscribers will T-Mobile add in 2023? 1.5 million or less, 1.5 million-2 million, 2 million-2.5 million, 2.5 million-3 million, and over 3 million. We'll come back and see what our audience thinks. Before we get there, and of course, Peter, we're gonna welcome your opinion on this. Before we get there, are you seeing any changes to the competitive landscape? You talked about churn coming down, so maybe talk about competition, cable, DISH, and how that's, you know, how that is or isn't affecting what you're seeing on the churn side?
Well, certainly, you know, you see seasonality from a promotional intensity perspective. Q4 is always promotionally more intensive around the holidays to drive switching. The competitive intensity really continues at the same level we've seen, whether it's cable, whether it's the other competitors. You know, they've been in the run rate. They've been doing things. The difference for us is that because, again, we're driving this 5G network that's leading to overall network leadership, and it's becoming slowly, in consumer perception, it's changing. You know, over the course since the merger, we've changed the perception of Verizon's network leadership in the consumer space by half. We've cut that by half, and we're rapidly approaching the point where consumers believe that this is the best network. Business customers buy differently. We've spoken about that.
They actually test and, you know, we're seeing a lot more traction there. This actuality of the network is now translating into perception. That combined with these under-penetrated markets is what gives us a differentiated opportunity and why even in the face of, you know, more normalization from the period of very high net adds that we saw in 2021, and we think, you know, postpaid switching is probably down about 5%-6% relative to last year. Again, net adds we project will be down relative to last year's high, and yet we just delivered our best postpaid phone quarter since, you know, the merger and delivered the lowest churn. That is because it's really the value proposition and the network proposition. That, that's how we approached it, and it's growth across all of the growth segments that we've talked about.
That's why we're in a very differentiated place. We expect 2023 will continue to see normalization of net add growth. We continue to be positioned in a way that allows us to compete and deliver industry-leading growth in a profitable way despite that happening.
Let's see the results of our survey. 8%, one and a half million or less, 17%, one and a half to two, 33%, two to two and a half, 29%, two and a half to three, and 13% over three.
Excellent.
How do you feel about that?
Great set of results. Of course, we'll guide on customers, you know, in a few weeks here when we come to year-end earnings. I couldn't be more pleased with 2022 at, you know, $3.1 million postpaid phone net additions in the quarter or in the year, sorry.
How, when you said growth could normalize in 2023, what does that mean, you know, for industry postpaid phone net adds? Like, what's the baseline that, you know, kinda T-Mobile's thinking about for normalization?
You know, we run, obviously, as you'd expect, a plethora of scenarios, and our job is to really think about sensitivities and what do we see the industry's doing. You know, you're probably gonna see somewhere in the order of 9 million this year. We think it's going to be lower than that. You know, there again, we probably weighted certain scenarios. I, you know, I don't have a pinpoint number that we said that's the number because we look at multiple scenarios, but I think it's going to be lower than that.
One of the things that's really evolved this year for T-Mobile was ARPU growth. As you look at the Magenta metrics you were sharing with us earlier, can ARPU grow again in 2023, and is there anything on the integration side or other factors that might affect that?
Well, from an integration perspective, as you know, we did the vast majority of our rate plan mapping. That was really in an effort to get the Sprint customer base mapped into rate plans that then could be part of the streaming conversion. We can get into kind of the last stages of integration a little bit later. There's a little bit left to do with some bespoke business plans that will be a little bit of a headwind to ARPU, it's very immaterial. More importantly for us, as we've been saying for a while, you know, we're here to capture the switcher relationships. You saw that in Q4 and of course, full 2022, you know, postpaid net account additions.
But more importantly, in the 5G world, with the opening of more connected devices with high speed internet or fixed wireless, our focus has been drive the account switchers in and then expand ARPA. You know, because ARPU becomes a mix-driven metric. For example, you know, the more success we see in large enterprise and governments, of course, naturally they tend to have lower per unit ARPUs, but they have high CLVs. While you may have more success there in a quarter versus less, that may have ARPU impacts, but our focus is service revenue growth through both industry-leading customer growth as well as accounts and ARPA growth. That's what we're focused on.
As you look at the account growth that you were describing earlier, are there any of the under-penetrated segments that you've detailed today and in the past that really stand out? Was it rural? Was it business? Certain things that just really stood out in terms of the success of the quarter?
The beauty of it is it's execution across all of those fronts. We continue to see between top 100 and smaller markets and rural areas. You know, in Q3, we said it was roughly split 50/50 from a net account addition, and we continue to see about equal metrics in Q4. You have high-speed internet only, which is not only just a way to bring in bundled products and bring in and pull through phone, but a way, especially in smaller markets and rural areas, as the network is being built out and really coming in with a differentiated product, a way to change people's perceptions really quickly about the product. We do have a slew of high-speed internet only accounts that then opens up the opportunity to sell phone into.
T-Mobile for Business just continued to have a great Q4. In Q3, we mentioned that both from a postpaid phone net account or postpaid phone addition perspective as well as a postpaid phone churn perspective, the Q3 was one of our best quarters ever. On both of those metrics, Q4 was better than Q3. That growth there in T-Mobile for Business continues to do really well and across all the segments, micro, SMB, enterprise, government, everywhere we're focused. That's the beauty of the machine and why, despite maybe normalization from the high, again, why we have a differentiated opportunity to continue to grow at very profitable levels, in an outsized manner.
Are you ready for our second survey?
Absolutely.
All right. Let's go to the polls. We're going to come back to the subject in a few minutes. How many fixed wireless broadband subscribers will T-Mobile add in 2023? 1 million or less, 1 million-1.5 million, 1.5 million-2 million, 2 million-2.5 million, or over 2.5 million. We'll see how people respond to that. Before we get to fixed wireless, you mentioned the integration and maybe getting any of these last phases. What's entailed in these last phases, and what does that mean for the pacing of synergy realization?
Well, first, I'd be remiss not to brag just for a second about the team and what they've done. I mean, we've already announced it obviously, but getting the cell site decommissioning done not only ahead of schedule, so about 1 year ahead of the original merger plan and about three months ahead of where we thought we would be, even when we gave Analyst Day guidance, was just a phenomenal success. Doing it in the backdrop of the churn figures that we delivered is probably the most impressive thing that the team, you know, Neville and Ulf and team have done spectacular work there cross-functionally. You know, that's really, to me, the number one thing, and something to be tremendously proud of. What remains, as we said, is predominantly billing conversion.
The way we designed this integration from the onset is we disconnected the network migration from the billing migration from the brand migration. We effectively mapped or groomed customers to their destination rate plans. We talked a little bit earlier. There's still a little bit of work to do on the, on the small subset of business bespoke plans on the Sprint biller, but we'll get through those. As we're building the functionality in the Magenta biller to match the functionality in the Sprint biller. What we then have is basically very seamless, what we call streaming conversion of the accounts. They go from one biller to the other. You get a, "Hey, welcome.
Now you're part of the T-Mobile biller. It's very seamless to the customer, which is in an effort to make sure that we're not, you know, driving irritants and churn. That's already happening at pace. We anticipate as we finalize all the build of the capabilities, that'll be the last big piece that's done at the end of 2023. There's other smaller things. With the biller migration, you get the full suite of customer care that we have. Not everything is built into the Sprint biller. Of course, we're gonna get through the balance of the lease device constructs onto our EIP financing constructs, which is more customer-friendly. That's basically it. It's been just a tremendous success. We anticipate wrapping this up in 2023 and, you know, can't be more proud of the team.
Given what you're describing on the synergies being ahead of schedule, and I think in the past, the management team has also talked about, you know, being ahead, what does that mean for the multi-year financial guidance? Does that mean that puts T-Mobile in a position to outperform those original multi-year expectations?
Well, you know, again, we're on track to deliver the increased $7 and a half billion run rate synergies and do that in 2024. What we saw in 2022 was that ability to quicken the network decommissioning gave us in-year benefit, and, you know, that flowed obviously in Q2 and Q3 to the bottom line. Because we are three months ahead of schedule, we'll get a benefit in 2022. Exiting 2022, we effectively thought we'd be in the same kinda exit run rate space. For 2023, we think it's gonna be exactly where we anticipate, and we'll guide this as part of earnings for where we think synergies are gonna be on our path again to the $7 and a half billion in 2024.
What's happening on the macro front in terms of are you seeing any changes in customer behavior, tear downs, changes in payment behavior? you know, anything to give you know, some indications of a changing economic climate?
From a customer perspective, of course, the period of the pandemic and the stimulus funds brought involved churn and bad debt levels across the industry to phenomenally low levels. I mean, you know, things we hadn't seen before. We had mentioned on the Q3 call what we saw was a return of involved churn to pre-pandemic levels, and we continue to see that. In fact, Q4 was just a touch better than Q3. We're not seeing anything there. Remember, these were pre-pandemic levels for us in the 2019 timeframe that were kind of our best in company history. We're seeing a return to that. We continue to see about that level. We certainly aren't seeing anything with respect to rate plan migrations. We talked about the Magenta MAX take rate continues to be tremendously high.
All of that seems, you know, right. Of course, we're very cautious about this and looking at this every single day. We have, as many times we've talked before because of our history, an ability to work with variable income customers in a way that others probably don't. That said, throughout the balance of the last couple years, because of the network and because of what we've built, we've also attracted a tremendously higher amount of prime consumers into the base. It's an improvement in terms of the prime consumer mix. It's our ability to work with variable income consumers. We've seen exactly what we thought last quarter, which is, yeah, kind of a return to that pre-pandemic level, but nothing worse.
What about on the cost side and inflation side? How are you managing that? Is that an incremental headwind in 2023?
Well, you know, this is another place where we're a little bit differentiated. In the biggest areas of cost in the business, before this macroeconomic and inflationary environment hit, we're able to secure long-term agreements, and we needed to do that as part of the merger, both with our OEMs as we went through, you know, a very massive network rollout and CapEx is gonna step down in 2023 relative to 2022, which was the peak year for us, as we had said. We locked those down. We locked our two big tower vendors down, you know, into long-term agreements with just tremendous rates, including escalators in one case that actually escalate down at a period when inflation was low. Those are probably contracts that wouldn't be able to be executed today.
All of our debt is fixed rate. You know, a lot of our energy contracts are in PPAs and VPPAs, about 2/3 of them, so that effectively locks them. But of course, we've seen it and we've talked about, we've seen it on the edges. We've seen it with labor. We've seen it with bad debt. We've seen it with some of the smaller component vendors that we didn't have in long-term arrangements, but that's all embedded in the guide that we had given for 2022. You know, while of course on the edges it's a headwind for 2023, for us because of that ability to lock those big vendors down, I don't see it as a big headwind for us.
Just a follow-up to this and then we'll get into the fixed wireless discussion. Previously in the multi-year guide, I think the objective was to get CapEx to $9 billion-$10 billion in 2023. You had, you know, strong growth, not just in mobile, but in fixed. Does the demand environment and the revenue growth that you've experienced impact how you look at CapEx for 2023?
Well, I'm gonna resist the temptation to give you all the guidance for 2023, but on the CapEx range, you know, we currently still see the 9-10 range as being the right range for 2023. We hit you saw us pull forward from outer years into 2022 some of the network build and deliver on, you know, just tremendous results, 260 million covered pops on mid-band and now 323 million on low-band 5G. That's been an incredible result. We're gonna see that step down. That was the peak year of intensity. We're now on our way to achieve, you know, roughly that 300 million covered pops on mid-band in an approach that's very customer driven. You know, customer-driven coverage is what we're saying.
9-10 feels like the right range currently.
Let's go to the survey results and move over to fixed wireless. In terms of the number of new subscribers that T-Mobile can add in 2023, 3% is $1 million or less, 24% is $1 million-$1.5 million, 48% is $1.5 million-$2 million, and 24% is $2 million-$2.5 million. Maybe talk about what's driving your fixed wireless growth right now and how you see the opportunity to continue to increase subscriptions for this business?
Yeah, absolutely. As you know, for us, the model is a little bit different with fixed wireless. It's an excess capacity model because of the massive amount of network capacity that's being built here. We've used many different analogies, but, you know, my favorite one from Neville is the expressway analogy, where we went from one lane and we're on our way to a 14-lane highway. We're now at about seven. We're about halfway through that, you know. When you think about both the breadth of what we've rolled out, but also the depth of spectrum. We're at about 120 megahertz rolled out of mid-band spectrum right now on our way to 200 megahertz by the end of 2023. That creates a tremendous amount of capacity, an amount of capacity that's just not...
even with our projected growth in postpaid phone and other connected devices growth in terms of the subscriber growth as well as the per unit growth in data. You know, we had long ago, pre-merger, hypothesized how much data growth on a per device unit was going to go, and it's going about how we, how we anticipated. We look at every sector. On a sector by sector basis, we're modeling out what the projected growth is from postpaid phones, which is, you know, what we're protecting at all costs. It's our highest CLV product. Looking at all the other connected devices and saying all of that cannot fill up the capacity that we're generating. That's when we're approving, you know, households in those sectors to sell fixed wireless. There's a couple things that are happening.
One is more of the network and more of the spectrum is being rolled out, so that's going to continue to increase the amount of available homes that are able to purchase the product, and that's going to happen throughout 2023 and beyond as this build continues. The other is we're seeing growth across the board. I mean, it's definitely been majority consumer for us at the moment, but business continues to increase their growth of the high-speed internet product. We're seeing it spread across rural and urban. Again, I would suspect the mix will shift a little bit more to the rural and suburban or the smaller markets in rural areas as that network build continues to progress there. Demand is fabulous on this product.
You know, when you look at the NPS scores, yeah, there's a number of them out there. I'll quote HarrisX for a moment, which puts us 30 points above cable and even 10 points above fiber. You're seeing the tremendous demand. We did something fun. As you would expect, we always try things, this is a growing business. One of the things we tried in Q4, given the holiday season and the promotional side of it, is our $25 bundled offer. Again, much like on the postpaid phone side, from the HSI side, it was a small minority of activations that actually took that $25 rate plan. The hypothesis on the test was, could we pull through more phones as well?
We have a certain flow of high-speed internet only accounts that presents great opportunity for sales in the future. We tested this. Small minority of activations actually landed on that $25 rate plan, but we did see some interesting incremental phone pull through. The demand for the product is really strong. The NPS scores prove that out. As more capacity continues to build, you know, this is right about the pace that we want to be in that 500,000 mark a quarter.
Well, that rolls right into our next survey question, we're going to ask our audience, does T-Mobile need to incrementally invest in fixed and mobile convergence? The choices are, nope, T-Mobile should remain a wireless pure play for connectivity. Yes, T-Mobile should invest in greenfield fiber access, including the BEAD Program. Yes, T-Mobile should partner and invest with regional telcos. Yes, T-Mobile should begin purchasing regional cable operators. We're gonna go to the polls, but before we get to this topic, let's touch on prepaid. What's going on in the prepaid segment, both in terms of the retail business, and then what do you see on the wholesale side in terms of do you have more visibility with the roll-off of TracFone and DISH?
Well, let's start with prepaid. You know, on an industry level, certainly prepaid has been more challenged in 2022. Year-over-year, we think Q4 will be down from an industry perspective, from a switcher perspective, close to 30%. Despite that, we have one of the largest prepaid brands. We continue to show growth, and you saw that with our Q4 results. We had a fabulous year of growth. We had our lowest year of prepaid churn in the company's history. We're very pleased with how Metro is going despite what's happening there. I think you see Cable's success. It's a little hard to dissect their postpaid phones because what they disclose is total postpaid, not actually postpaid phone. As we've said before, we're forecasting that certainly Charter will probably have its best quarter ever.
Most of that flow seems to be coming from Verizon and prepaid. I think when you look at their pricing constructs, it's very analogous sometimes to prepaid. I think as an industry, that's where prepaid is seeing some flow share go. There's definitely flow share from prepaid into postpaid as well. Although for us, prepaid to postpaid migrations were actually down year-over-year, so we delivered that 927 despite it actually being lower. I think that's what's happening in the prepaid market, but we continue to be very pleased with what we're seeing with Metro by T-Mobile, as well as some of the T-Mobile Connect brands. On the wholesale front, you know, our strategy has always been and will continue to be finding partners that complement us, right? We're not interested in just competing in the same places.
Do they have a different customer segment that perhaps they can bring a differentiated strength to? Do they have different distribution? That's how we approach and think about wholesale relationships. On the revenue side, you know, for Tracfone, that $750 million that we referenced back in Analyst Day, we had assumed would be, and we still expect will be effectively gone by the end of 2023. With DISH, you saw us enter into a multi-year agreement that has revenue minimums, albeit at lower levels than what we had forecasted at Analyst Day. You know, no changes there since we had spoken about that in the last couple of quarters.
Let's go to our survey responses. 42% of our respondents said, nope, you should stay a wireless pure play. 19% a ctually, the next three responses are split, almost evenly at 19% between the greenfield fiber access, partnering and investing with regional telcos, and beginning to purchase regional cable operations. How are you looking at the importance and/or urgency of having a greater fixed to mobile converged offer in the marketplace?
Well, you sort of asked about it in two different ways, and we think about it in two. One is we're continuing on our path of fixed wireless and high-speed internet and achieving that $7 million-$8 million target. You know, again, that's right around this $500,000 run rate. We're on pace, and that's our goal, and that's embedded in the Analyst Day plans. We have spoken about looking at are there circumstances under which we might invest incremental CapEx for incremental fixed wireless customers? All of that would have to be accretive to what we gave you at Analyst Day, and that's something we're investigating but have no conclusions for. With respect to fiber, it's really the same as we've been saying for the last couple of quarters. We're open-minded.
We're open-minded in terms of would there be a way for our brand, our distribution, our customer relationships to create a value proposition there that might make sense from an investment perspective, whether it's partnerships or direct investments. Again, that would have to be accretive to what we gave at Analyst Day. We've made no decisions there at all. As you'd expect, we're investigating it. That's what you do as, you know, pay us for as a management team is to make sure we're looking across the horizon and making the right decision. What that is, you know, could be pure play, could be a little bit of investment, could be nothing. I don't know. We're looking at that. No conclusions yet.
When you, when you look at those possibilities, what's the end goal? Is it just to simply sell more wireless or are there some other opportunities that you're looking at in terms of testing this fiber model?
Again, I think your hypothesis is that we're much further along in the process than we are because we're just looking at things and understanding. For example, one of the things you could ask yourself is, with your brand, with your distribution, with your customer relationships, could you achieve higher penetration rates than a standalone fiber player? Maybe. Maybe not, right? You'd have to convince yourself of that. That's something you could look at potentially. Again, these are things we're looking at at a high level. We have some fiber pilots, as you know. We're understanding some of the dynamics there. Those are the things you'd look at.
When you think about capacity, whether it's for mobile, whether it's for fixed wireless. When you started the process, C-band wasn't out there, CBRS wasn't out there, right? There's more spectrum that's out there now, maybe millimeter wave is, you know, I'm not sure if that was a defined part of the opportunity. Is there a much more expansive opportunity for T-Mobile and fixed wireless because of the deeper spectrum position you had today relative to when you started the merger?
Potentially. Again, right now our focus is build out all the tremendous capacity because as you said, you know, It was always Neville's famous layer cake, millimeter wave was always going to have a place in very dense urban environments or venues. I'm not interested in spending I don't know how many billions of dollars of CapEx to put millimeter wave nodes everywhere and drive 1% of my traffic on it. That's not what the strategy is. It's not efficient. I can't help myself sometimes. Sorry. The focus really is how do we drive this plethora of spectrum out there for the benefit of the consumer, bridging the digital divide, driving these under-penetrated growth opportunities for us.
If it makes sense to incrementally invest CapEx, densify maybe with C-band, which we bought some of in very dense urban environments where it makes sense to deploy potentially over and above our 2.5 portfolio, maybe. Again, all of that would have to be incremental to what we've given you at Analyst Day in terms of targets and service revenue, free cash flows, et cetera.
Last survey of the afternoon. How much do you expect for T-Mobile share repurchases in 2023? $10 billion or less, $10 billion-$15 billion or over $15 billion. We'll go to the polls on that. Before we just talk about capital allocation, in terms of free cash flow or buybacks, any updates just in terms of how T-Mobile's viewing target leverage levels?
There's really no update. Very consistent. You know, we believe the right place for us to be is in that mid-two space and, you know, in the midterm itself. That's, that's the focus and the goal. It's completely consistent with, you know, where we are from an IG perspective. You've seen us diversify some of our funding sources that you'd expect. We entered the asset-backed security market with our equipment installment plan receivables. It continues to be we wanna stay at a very healthy level of leverage. We're continuing to grow as a company. We continue to see the free cash flow generation potential that we laid out at Analyst Day, but it's always gonna be with a healthy leverage mindset.
We've got our results in. 10% is $10 billion or less, 60% is $10 billion-$15 billion, and 30% is over $15 billion. Just a couple questions on this. How does the rate environment, just higher rates, affect the pacing of share repurchases, if at all? Is there any updates from the guidance that you gave for fourth quarter in terms of share repurchases?
Well, I think in terms of guidance on share repurchases, we'll probably update you as part of or actually on results, we'll update you as part of earnings. In terms of what's been authorized, you know, it continues to be an authorization of up to $14 billion through Q3 of next year. Anything beyond that would have to be authorized by the board. You know, we still see confidence in the path of up to $60 billion, which is based off what we expect from a leverage perspective, from a free cash flow generation perspective. You know, we continue to have line of sight to that. But anything beyond the $14 billion would be at the board's discretion. I'll update you on actuals as to what we've repurchased.
You heard us, through, you know, October 20th, have the $1.5 billion. We had been authorized for up to $3 billion in 2022. We'll give you actuals a little bit later. I don't wanna get into the, like, the day-to-day of, you know, how we're thinking about share repurchases and volumes. Of course, you have to factor in the rate environment, right? Now I would tell you where the rate environment sits currently vis-à-vis what we believe the shareholder return potential is and where we think the stock price is going based on our belief in the trajectory of the business. It continues, from our perspective, to make sense to do. You know, if certainly if interest rates get to some sky-high amount, you always have to factor that calculus in.
When you say $14 billion through third quarter of next year, you're referring to 2023?
Yes. That was the board authorization was up to $14 billion through the end of Q3 of 2023, and that was inclusive of the up to $3 billion in 2022.
Just a last question. How do you think about dividends versus repurchases? Is that something that you're thinking more about in terms of creating a, just a regular dividend distribution for investors?
Yeah. It's something we've talked about. We think right now, this form of shareholder return makes sense for us. We continue to be a very high-growth company. That continues to be our aspiration into 2023 strategically and beyond, and delivering on the commitments that we've given you. Is there a potential in the future? Maybe, for a dividend type of structure, but we have to see how things evolve. Of course, that would be fully at the discretion of the board. For now, you know, the share repurchase path, we think makes a lot of sense and that's how we're gonna continue for the time being.
Well, thanks for sharing your time with us today.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.