AT&T (T) is one of the most tried-and-true dividend stocks in the S&P 500. It has increased its dividend for 33 years in a row.

AT&T is a Dividend Aristocrat, a group of 51 stocks in the S&P 500 with 25+ consecutive years of dividend increases.

AT&T recently released first-quarter earnings, and the results were mixed.

The company met analyst estimates on earnings-per-share, and benefited from strong customer additions in wireless.

At the same time, AT&T came up short on quarterly revenue, and saw a significant uptick in postpaid customer losses.

The good news is that while competition is heating up, AT&T has the financial resources to adapt to the changing environment.

This article will discuss AT&T’s first-quarter performance, and why it remains a high-quality dividend stock.

Quarterly Performance Overview

Among the highlights from AT&T’s first quarter performance:

AT&T’s earnings-per-share matched analyst expectations, while revenue fell short by about $1.16 billion. This was a considerable miss on revenue.

In the same quarter of 2016, AT&T reported earnings-per-share of $0.72, on revenue of $40.5 billion. So while AT&T’s quarterly revenue declined 2.8% year over year, earnings-per-share increased by 2.8%.

Source: Q1 Presentation, page 5

One reason for the declining revenue was low equipment sales, including weak phone sales.

However, the company successfully cut costs to grow earnings. Another bright spot was AT&T’s stronger-than-expected wireless network additions.

AT&T’s 2.7 million wireless adds last quarter came in well ahead of the 2.08 million analysts had expected.

However, an area of concern for AT&T is that it lost 191,000 postpaid phone subscribers in the first quarter. That said, AT&T still fared much better than its major competitor Verizon Communications (VZ), which lost 289,000 postpaid wireless subscribers in the first quarter.