The Un-carrier thinks it’s un-stoppable.
On Tuesday, T-Mobile announced its preliminary results for the third quarter of 2016, and the mobile service provider is already celebrating the progress it’s made over the last few months. According to the company’s release, “a preliminary view of several key customer results for the third quarter of 2016 … continues to show consumers are flocking to the Un-carrier.”
A number of key events seem to have catalyzed this growth, including the introduction of T-Mobile One and the release of the iPhone 7, which saw the strongest pre-order numbers in T-Mobile’s history.
T-Mobile says that the company has already outdone its second quarter results in terms of key subscriber performance metrics, which include branded postpaid phone and prepaid net customer additions. Moreover, many of these additions are coming from T-Mobile’s chief competitors — the company estimates that 250,000 postpaid phone and prepaid net customer additions came from Verizon, 400,000 came from AT&T, and 300,000 came from Sprint.
“All three wireless carriers tried to match Un-carrier signature moves this quarter, like getting rid of overages and introducing unlimited data plans, but as usual, they came up short,” said John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile. “Our Q3 results so far have surpassed Q2 in postpaid phone and prepaid nets, and we are adding customers from all of the other guys at an increasing rate.”
Noting that T-Mobile has achieved “near parity with the once dominant Verizon coverage” when it comes to LTE coverage, Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s CTO, insisted that Big Red’s previous advantage has disappeared. “Now, Verizon’s rebranding their older, slower network as ‘LTE Advanced,’ highlighting technology we launched two years ago,” he said. “Even with their ‘new’ technology, T-Mobile’s LTE network is still faster — just ask OpenSignal, Ookla, or the FCC.”
So if you’re with John Legere and the pink and black team, it looks like you’re in pretty good hands these days.
