John Stankey : Sure, Dave. How are you? I don’t agree with your thesis at its point. I absolutely 100% dismiss your thesis. And I don’t think that’s how the market is structured and functioning today by any stretch of the imagination. I think our — I go back and I look at our performance over the last 2.5 years, first of all, I would tell you, I think the industry is a lot more healthy than many who would like to trying to come up with this narrative? Is competition up? Or is it destroying itself? I mean I see a pretty consistently competitive industry over this period of time. And I tend to look at it not just on customer counts, but I look at things like both wholesale and retail revenues and how that’s flowing through to service revenues.
And I see a relatively balanced dynamic in the industry, but the math would tell you that balance dynamic would suggest we’ve been picking up a bit of share when it’s all said and done. And I don’t think that’s a benefit of the number moving from whatever you assume the normal stasis is $7.5 million to $9 million. In fact, I would say of customers that are paying a reasonable monthly bill, we’ve taken more than our fair share, and I’m more interested in taking revenue share and profitability share than I am necessarily just taking a subscriber share. And I think our numbers would suggest that we’ve seen an ever improving trend over the 2.5 years in our ability to do that. So I don’t submit to your point of view that if the “industry normalizes” we revert back to kind of where we were three years ago.
I think where we are is because of how we’re performing today, not what was going on three years ago, and that’s kind of how I think about it. What I would tell you, Dave, is I don’t think there’s a windfall that comes in on restructuring of legacy costs. And I’ve I think I’ve been on this theme for a little while. I mean we’ve been working this issue pretty aggressively since the day I came into the job, and I would say we had to start formulating the plans when I came in, but now we have a very robust and functioning organization that we’re doing this kind of day in and day out. And I spend more time talking about investing in the new business and the growth that we can get on sustainable fiber and a 5G infrastructure than I do on talking about what we are taking out of service, but we are taking stuff out of service.
And so when we start managing things like our energy costs down, it’s because we’re decommissioning equipment and taking it off the copper grid when we are able to manage our dispatches down and show you improvements in our operating dynamics on dispatches. It’s because we have a smaller footprint to manage. We are doing this day in and day out. And our pace at which we’re doing it is accelerating. We’ve — I’ve given you some hints along the way about the number of products that we’ve shuttered and when we shuttered those products, it starts to take operating costs out of the business. This is part of what we have in our forecast to you to continue to improve our operating costs. So you’re seeing this operating leverage start to come into the business, and it’s partly contributed to the fact that we’re managing through these legacy costs.
And as we give you the forecast for cash this year, when we talk about improvements in our overall cost structure, some of it is coming on the backs of what we’re doing here. And I’m very well aware of where our cost structure is on a comparative basis to others that we compete with in the industry, some of which do not have the hybrid asset structure that we have of both fixed and mobile. And we are on this mission to ensure that we’re not operating any of that at a disadvantage over the next three, four and five years. And I think you’re going to just see this ratably come in over that period of time as we work through what is — it’s frankly a bit of a painstaking process to go through. It’s central office by central office line by line, customer by customer, but it needs to be done.
I think it can be done in a way that makes us a better and healthier business where we have a great hybrid of a fabulous fiber footprint with a fabulous wireless network that is ultimately the future of how customers are going to buy together, and I like that. I think that hard work will be rewarded in that regard, but I will fully admit, we are creating new intellectual property here around how you get to this space. And I’m choosing to do it organically internally, not through a front-end private equity transaction that puts a little bit of cash in my pocket but ultimately has the value of it accrue to somebody else over the hard work of three, four and five years.
Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Craig Moffett with SVB MoffettNathanson.
Craig Moffett : I want to stay, if I could, with this topic of your portfolio of broadband, John, if I think about your kind of overall Mobility national footprint, it sort of maps with today roughly call it, 16%, 17% of the country already overbuilt with fiber, another 10% or 12% to be overbuilt with fiber. Can you just talk about how you think about the consumer value proposition in those different segments where you have wireless that doesn’t have a fiber component where it does? And then — and what role fixed wireless might play to sort of round out that consumer value proposition.
John Stankey : Yes. The way I think about it, Craig, is — and I tried to use this reference earlier is, I think it’s a bit of a — I don’t want to use the term land rush, because it’s not it’s not that easy to put fiber and it takes a little bit longer than a land rush, but we are definitely in a window right now where I do believe a good portion of the United States will ultimately have a fiber connection to it. And I believe there will be — if you think about this over the long haul that we’re moving to an industry, and I’ve been pretty clear about this, ultimately, customers are going to want to buy connectivity from one place. They don’t necessarily love making a distinction between their fixed provider and their mobile provider.
And I think over time, we’re going to see an ordering of industry assets that leans more toward that. And my point of view to be in a strong position as you — if you have the best technology out there and you ultimately build the largest footprint fastest, you’re going to be in a better position to ultimately play in the outcome of how that restructuring gets done, and you’re going to have the strongest customer base on a relative basis and owning and operating those assets and having the ability to control the product offering and control the cost on it will be the best way to control your progress going forward. So yes, it’s a deliberate process to continue to build fiber infrastructure and ultimately overlay it with the wireless business, but that’s a process that I think is incredibly durable and sustainable.
And my job is to make sure I’m doing it faster and better than anybody else and I think it’ll come out in an okay place as a result of that. And as I said, my job is to ensure that people who give us money to go and allow for us to make that investment feel that on a marginal basis, on an incremental basis, we’re doing that in a way that’s driving successful returns. I think fixed wireless, as I said, has its place in the portfolio. I don’t see it’s place long term in dense metropolitan areas, and I don’t see it in reasonably well populated suburban areas. I don’t see the dynamic of that product, and I’ve been pretty clear about this, if I start to think about consumer behavior and demand of consumption, and I start to take those curves out over three years, I don’t see that as the optimal way to service a customer in the near term.
So I think the mobile network’s role in life is to ensure that whenever somebody is away from a fixed location, they can still get the same kind of capabilities that they get while they’re at home, but there’s only a certain amount of bandwidth that a mobile network will ever be able to foster and support in that regard. Mobile bits are going to be higher-value bits. They’re going to need to be engineered differently. They should sell at a premium because of the supply and demand dynamics on it. And I want to ensure that my mobile network is, in fact, delivering that premium solution on those mobile bets when they need to be provided. And it’s absolutely 100% there to do that. And I think at the end of the day, if your mobile network is doing that mad fashion, then you’re going to have an opportunity to work in the high-value mobile space for what are going to be emerging capabilities that people need to facilitate the true promise of 5G and real-time transmission ubiquitously any place anywhere.
