T-Mobile, arguably either the third or fourth place US carrier, looks to be in a bit of trouble at the moment. While AT&T adds more subscribers with each new iPhone, Sprint with the Palm Pre, and Verizon for its network, T-Mobile doesn’t look to be doing quite as well as the others. T-Mobile has never been the top carrier, but it’s also never reported such a slow quarter.
T-Mobile for the spring quarter of this year only managed to grab 325,000 new customers. Compare that number to the 668,000 of last year and you can see just what effect the iPhone and Pre can have on a carrier with no new super phone to compete against them. Included in that number is also a churn rate of 2.2 percent, meaning 2.2 percent of old customers were replaced by those new customers. Those new customers raised the amount of revenue for T-Mobile from data usage, though it actually managed to drop its average revenue per customer from $52 to $48 compared to AT&T’s average revenue of $60.21.
While T-Mobile has no big phone releases last quarter, with yesterday’s release of the MyTouch 3G paired with its new agreements to sell phones in RadioShack (err, I mean, The Shack, of course), things might be looking up. Anyone posting a great quarter whenever there’s a new iPhone would be greatly surprising. However, now with all of Apple’s ridiculous App Store policies, T-Mobile being the only Android carrier in the country right now might see some better numbers this quarter. Things might turn out better if T-Mobile had actually decided to bring the Hero to the US, rather than potentially allowing Sprint to snatch it up, but even that’s not a guarantee.
Read [Electronista]
My AT&T contract expires in November. Who is going to have HTC's "Hero"?