End of week note: AT&T adds 325,000 prepaid

MetroPCS really jumped out ahead of the pack in reporting their Q1 results, and with good reason. They added 684,000 customers, something to brag about these days. It was more than T-Mobile added total. Clearly, Metro won’t top AT&T any time soon. The nation’s second largest carrier added 1.2 million subscribers in the first quarter, so they’re still ahead of the game. Yet 325,000 of those were prepaid, a solid number. Yet that’s not as good as last year. In the first quarter 2008 AT&T added 1.3 million subscribers, 705,000 of which were postpaid. So that means they added nearly 600,000 prepaid subscribers in the quarter. That doesn’t sound quite right. Yet it’s what you get when you take a look at the information available.

	2008	2009
Net adds	1.3 mil	1.2 mil
Postpaid	705,000	875,000
Difference	595,000	325,000

It’s a bit baffling that they could have added so many more prepaid customers last year than this year. The economic situation seems a bit worse, after all. ]]>