Bookending our day today is T-Mobile, who in addition to announcing prorated early termination fees have reported their third quarter data. Skimming over the financial data, they’re down over a billion dollars from the third quarter of last year. Heh, gotcha. While that’s true, they’re said to have received a $1.5 billion non-cash income tax benefit in the third quarter of last year. So really, they’re up quite significantly ($1.79 billion minus the $1.5 billion, measured against $526 million in revenues this year). But really, what we’re interested in is the subscriber data. T-Mobile added 857,000 customers during the quarter, bringing it to 28 million subscribers total. They’re still a long way from the big three, but with Sprint losing customers, we could see a flip-flop between Nos. 3 and 4 before long. Churn was down for T-Mobile, unlike Sprint, Verizon, andAT&T, from 2.3 percent to 2.0 percent. This is still more, though, than Verizon and AT&T, and right along the same lines as Sprint. If T-Mobile is going to become No. 3, they’re going to have to find a way to reduce the churn rate (and enhance service in the Northeast, but that’s for another day).
“Right around the beginning of the quarter, we introduced yet another in our series of breakthrough services aimed at bringing T-Mobile to greater numbers of new customers,” said Robert Dotson, Chief Executive Officer and President of T-Mobile USA, “Our new HotSpot @HomeSM service is changing the game by allowing customers to make unlimited calls from home over Wi-Fi while providing the best in-home wireless coverage possible. This service opens up an important new growth area for our company to go after, the displacement of landline telephone service with T-Mobile service. We also continue to add greater numbers of new customers onto myFavesSM with more than 3.5 million people on the service and growing.”We actually expect Hotspot to attract more customers in the future. People are usually wary of new services like this, and wait for later generations so that the bugs are weeded out. T-Mobile will probably see a growth pursuant to Hotspot over the next few quarters. Then again, what do we know? [Cellular News] [Trading Markets]]]>