AT&T loses postpaid phone subscribers as T-Mobile takes away customers

(credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T started the year with a mix of subscriber gains and losses in its core businesses, with losses in TV and postpaid phone customers to go along with increases in DirecTV and its overall total of wireless subscriptions.

In wireless, AT&T ended the quarter with 363,000 fewer postpaid phone subscribers, the company said yesterday. This loss coincided with T-Mobile USA adding 877,000 postpaid phone customers, mostly at the expense of AT&T. "According to [T-Mobile CEO John] Legere, approximately 80 percent of postpaid port-ins come from rival carriers AT&T and Verizon, with the lion’s share coming from AT&T," Wireless Week reported yesterday. (Verizon Wireless added 640,000 retail postpaid customers in the quarter.)

On the plus side for AT&T, most of its postpaid phone losses came from customers with feature phones. The average smartphone subscriber pays AT&T twice as much as a feature phone user. Overall, AT&T has 58.3 million postpaid smartphone subscribers, accounting for 88 percent of its postpaid phone customers. That proportion is growing, as smartphones accounted for 97 percent of AT&T's new phone sales in the quarter.

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