Pascal Desroches8:52
Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. At a consolidated level, total revenues were up 2.9% year-over-year in the first quarter and service revenues were up 1.4%. Our growth is increasingly driven by gains in fiber and fixed wireless internet customers as well as our success at growing customer accounts that choose AT&T for both internet and wireless connectivity. We continue to expect we will grow consolidated service revenues in the low single-digit range for the full year driven by growth in wireless service, fiber, and fixed wireless revenues partially offset by declines in transitional and legacy revenues. Adjusted EBITDA was up 2.3% year-over-year in the first quarter and adjusted EBITDA margin decreased 30 basis points to 37.4%. As a reminder, our first quarter 2025 results included a benefit to adjusted EBITDA of approximately 100 million related to the resolution of vendor settlements.
During the first quarter, we made good progress executing against our ongoing transformation initiatives as we work towards achieving our target of 4 billion in annual cost savings by the end of 2028. These include force optimization and vendor rationalization, efficiency gains from further AI enablement, accelerated digitalization efforts, and reductions to our legacy operations and support costs. We expect improved growth in adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter as comparisons normalize, service revenue growth improves, and as we implement further cost actions. And we continue to expect consolidated adjusted EBITDA growth in the 3 to 4% range for the full year.
Free cash flow was 2.5 billion which is at the high end of the 2 to 2.5 billion outlook we provided in January. Free cash flow declined by roughly $600 million compared to last year, which was driven primarily by higher capital investment of 5.1 billion as we accelerate the pace of our fiber deployment. For the second quarter, we expect free cash flow in the range of 4 billion to 4.5 billion and we continue to expect $18 billion plus of free cash flows for the full year. Adjusted EPS of 57 cents in the first quarter was up nearly 12% and we continue to expect full-year adjusted EPS to be in the $2.25 to $2.35 range.
Under our new segment reporting, over 90% of our consolidated revenue and nearly all of our adjusted EBITDA is generated by our advanced connectivity segment. We believe this new reporting format improves transparency into the growth we are achieving from our investments in fiber and 5G as well as our progress at powering down our legacy copper network. Focusing first on advanced connectivity, service revenues were up 3.6% compared to a year ago. Wireless service revenues grew 1.7% year-over-year, which is consistent with our guidance that growth in the first quarter would be below the run rate we expect for the full year. Our wireless service revenue growth was primarily driven by growth in our customer base, including 294,000 post-paid phone net adds in the first quarter. Post-paid Phone ARPU was flat versus a year ago. This is consistent with the outlook we provided for relatively stable ARPU as we gain customers in underpenetrated categories such as the value segment and grow our base of converged accounts that receive discounts but typically stay with us longer.
We expect second quarter year-over-year wireless service revenue growth to improve from growth reported in the first quarter and maintain our full-year outlook for growth in the 2% to 3% range. This is driven by our outlook for customer gains from our new unlimited and converged subscription plans and our expanding opportunity to sell wireless and home internet services together. It also reflects our recent pricing actions that take effect during the second quarter. Advanced home internet service revenues grew 27.3% year-over-year. This includes two months of revenues from fiber customers in geographies we acquired from Lumen, which added about 650 basis points to our reported growth rate in the quarter. Similar to wireless, our organic growth in advanced home internet service revenue was primarily driven by growth in our customer base. Advanced home internet net adds were 512,000, which does not include the 1.1 million customers we acquired from Lumen in early February. This was our best ever first quarter and included 273,000 fiber net adds and 239,000 Internet Air net adds.
We continue to expect that our fiber reach will grow by about 8 million locations in 2026, including over 4 million locations we acquired from Lumen. As we ramp our fiber reach, we expect to see improved trends in our fiber net adds over the course of the year while still considering typical seasonality. We are also seeing strong growth in our business fiber and advanced connectivity service revenues which include business fixed wireless and value added services. In the quarter, these revenues grew 7.2% year-over-year which is consistent with the trend last quarter and improved from mid-single-digit growth a year ago. As John noted, total advanced connectivity business service revenues were essentially flat year-over-year for the first time ever. Based on our improved sales execution and expanding fiber reach, we expect total business service revenues within advanced connectivity segment to remain stable in the near term and continue to grow at a low single-digit CAGR through 2028.
Advanced connectivity EBITDA grew 5.6% year-over-year and we improved EBITDA margin by 30 basis points despite a few notable headwinds. These include high single-digit growth in low margin equipment revenues as well as the inclusion of revenues in geographies acquired from Lumen which did not make a material contribution to EBITDA in the quarter. In addition, about 40% of the adjusted EBITDA benefit from the vendor settlements we called out in the first quarter of 2025 was incurred in the advanced connectivity segment. So the improvement in advanced connectivity margin was driven by service revenue growth as well as the durable benefit of cost actions that I discussed earlier. Our outlook continues to anticipate an immaterial EBITDA contribution this year from the operating regions acquired from Lumen. This reflects increased spending within these geographies to stand up a business that is positioned for faster growth in fiber and wireless customers. As fiber deployment accelerates and as we leverage our existing distribution in these regions, we're really pleased with how the business is positioned coming out of the first quarter and continue to expect advanced connectivity service revenues to grow 5% plus this year with EBITDA growth of 6% plus.
Legacy service revenues declined about 25% year-over-year, which is consistent with our outlook for 20% plus decline in 2026. We stopped taking new orders for legacy services last year in most of our wireline footprint. And we now have approval to discontinue legacy services in more than 30% of our wire centers. We're actively working with customers in these areas and helping them upgrade to more advanced services like Internet Air and Phone Advanced. There is a lag between when customers migrate to more advanced services and when we are able to discontinue operations of legacy infrastructure. This is the primary reason why the decline in legacy EBITDA of about 40% was greater than the decline in revenue and we expect this dynamic will persist for the next several quarters.
We ended the first quarter with net debt to adjusted EBITDA of 2.71 times which is up from 2.53 times at the end of the fourth quarter last year. This was primarily due to the close of the transaction with Lumen. We continue to expect that our net leverage ratio will increase to approximately 3.2 times following our transaction with EchoStar, then decline to approximately three times by the end of 2026 and return to a level consistent with our target in the two and a half times range within approximately three years following the transaction. We ended the first quarter with 12 billion in cash and with $19 billion available to draw under term loans. So, we are in a strong liquidity position as we prepare to close our transaction with EchoStar. We also continue to expect that we will close a transaction with an equity investor for the acquired Lumen fiber assets during the second half of the year.
We returned $4.3 billion to shareholders in the first quarter through dividends and share repurchases. We continue to expect to repurchase approximately $8 billion of stock this year and to maintain a consistent pace of buybacks through 2028 as we execute against our plans to return $45 billion plus to shareholders over this time period. I'm really proud of the team's ability to successfully balance our investment in fiber and 5G while maintaining consistent return to shareholders. To wrap up, we continue to execute well and I'm confident that we're positioned to drive improved growth and consistent capital returns through 2028 as we execute on our strategy. Brett, we're now ready for the Q&A.