AT&T indicated it had almost completed a business shift designed to refocus the operator on its core competencies, a move which has included major asset sales and two new strategic alliances.

“With yesterday’s announcement on Vrio and those that came before it, I would say we put the bulk of the framework in place to optimise our execution and performance in the business”, CEO John Stankey said on the company’s second quarter earnings call.

The company reported Q2 operating revenue of US$44 billion, up 7.6 per cent year-on-year. Second-quarter net income attributable to AT&T was US$1.5 billion, up 25 per cent.

Smartphone promotions helped AT&T add 789,000 post-paid customers, and executives said the last 12 months had yielded the highest number of contract phone net adds in more than a decade.

The company highlighted the efficiency of its marketing programme, saying average promotional expense per net add is lower than it was a year ago.

AT&T said its deal to sell 30 per cent of DirecTV to TPG Capital has progressed faster than expected and should close early next month.

Executives also discussed an MVNO deal with Dish Network, saying AT&T’s RAN is ready to support the traffic and customer migration should start later this year.

CFO Pascal Desroches predicted the agreement will provide “a boost to wireless service revenues in 2022”.

And CEO, AT&T Communications, Jeff McElfresh explained a deal to run its 5G core network in the Microsoft Azure cloud offered a way to boost its network’s compute power by bringing “Microsoft to the edge of our network…supporting our network workloads”.