T-Mobile, on the other hand, slowly picking up pace

Uh oh. Two straight stories on the quarterly reports from telecoms. If you’re asking “Why do I care?” right now, well, you’re asking a poignant question. Honestly, we don’t care about revenue and customer additions themselves, per se. We care about what those numbers mean for the future of those companies, from the perspective of a subscriber. For instance, when we just talked about Sprint, we weren’t looking at their sales breakdowns or anything like that. We were looking for signs of whether this company will provide better, worse, or the same service in the future. So bear with us as we go through another company’s reports: T-Mobile. Who, as it is, fared much better than Sprint. In total, T-Mobile added 857,000 subscribers last quarter, which is more than double Sprint’s number. Roughly 170,000 of those were prepaid, which beats out the overall number that Boost added for the quarter. So it appears that T-Mobile is inching closer and closer to its next closest competitor. Churn was also down to 1.8 percent, which is lower than Sprint’s number, which was just about 2 percent (that’s pretty normal). So they’re gaining more and losing fewer subscribers. This can only be a good thing for T-Mobile. However, they have just 27 million subscribers, about half of what Sprint boasts. There is a reason to be optimistic about T-Mobile’s growth, though. As we mentioned, the third quarter is usually not a good one for growth in the telecom industry. T-Mobile, though, has a brand new service — Hotspot @Home. We’ve seen no fewer than 10 of those commercials this week, and we rarely watch the teevee. So the word is spreading, which will lead to more and more people signing up for T-Mobile. Now here’s where the financials come into play. T-Mobile now has this innovative service that can benefit just about anyone. With Hotspot, your phone is your phone — there is no giving out home and cell numbers, because they’re all one. That is not only more convenient, but it cuts out the landline bill, which is likely more than the $20 per month that Hotspot costs. What they need now is to strengthen their network, especially in metropolitan areas. For instance, we hear nothing but complaints in the NY Metro area about T-Mobile’s quality of service. If they were able to expand their network there, they could easily see a huge spike in subscribers. But that takes money, so net gains are important right now for T-Mobile. This is where the news gets good: despite signing up fewer customers in than the first quarter of 2007, T-Mobile’s net gains spiked 11 percent. Even better, they were up 50 percent from the second quarter of 2006. Does this mean that T-Mobile is getting ready for a network expansion? Not necessarily. We feel, though, that if they could provide stronger service in metro areas, they could make astronomical gains. Hell, we’d probably switch to them in that case. [BusinessWire]]]>