AT&T (T) is betting big on Gigapower. So, what is it? AT&T CEO John Stankey tells Yahoo Finance it's a joint venture in which "BlackRock (BLK) is interested in investing in infrastructure. They saw a capable operator in our case. We came together, we put together a management team. They came with some financial backing, and we're now extending fiber outside of what used to be our traditional operating footprint, allows us to go faster, build more homes. It's a shared risk model. Shared return model is a result of that. It's a way to get the AT&T brand deeper out into the United States."

Gigapower is part of Stankey's "converge" strategy, which he describes as "a household that buys both fiber and wireless from us. When they do that, they churn less. They have greater lifetime value because of that. Their brand affinity goes up because they like the products together and the convenience of using them." He explains that right now, AT&T is selling its fiber product for less than others, but that it "bodes well for the future because after you get the customer, you bring them in, then you can obviously price to market. And we will do that over time."

One thing that could be good for AT&T is the launch of the new Apple iPhone 16. But when asked about it, Stankey points out that it ultimately comes down to people wanting to be on the AT&T network. "What we care is that there are phones out there connected to the network. That's kind of where we make our money and we're kind of less focused on the particular version of the device that we see," Stankey says, adding that there will likely be less of a "big bang... like when we go from 4G to 5G and there's a new air interface, and the phone's gonna perform dramatically differently because of that."

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This post was written by Stephanie Mikulich.