T-Mobile and its bombastic CEO John Legere have been making waves in the US wireless industry, and consumers have been taking notice. According to the latest quarterly earnings report filed by T-Mo, the carrier is now larger than its competitor Sprint, making it the number three runner in America. T-Mobile claims 58.9 million subscribers in the US as of July, narrowly besting Sprint's reported number of 56.8 million from today. T-Mobile has added at least a million customers each quarter for the last nine quarters, and 2.1 million in the last three months.
In truth, T-Mobile may have actually passed this milestone some time ago. Back in February, Roger Cheng of Cnet observed that Sprint actually counts prepaid subscribers who may or may not still be on the network (because their accounts were sold through third-party retailers and haven't been active for six months). At that point 1.7 million of those "dead" accounts were included in Sprint's reported totals, a fact that Legere pointed out, informally claiming that T-Mobile had already surpassed Sprint as of late winter.
Anyway, T-Mobile's constant push for lower price and more features has turned the company around from nearly being swallowed by AT&T just four years ago. If you're wondering, AT&T reported 121.7 million subscribers for the first quarter of this year, with Verizon in a close second at 108.2 million. (Those numbers include smartphones and feature phones on conventional, prepaid, and corporate accounts, plus tablets, hotspots, connected cars, and other gadgets - there may be more "subscribers" than people in the US at this point.) Unfortunately, T-Mobile's success as of late only seems to have bolstered its German parent company's efforts to sell it off.
Image credit: LA Times
Source: T-Mo News