• MOST READ

• LATEST NEWS

AT&T claimed “record wireless net adds” during the fourth quarter of 2010, and saw the first period when its mobile revenue exceeded its fixed line sales. The company added 2.8m new mobile customers during the quarter, to take its total to 95.5m.

This figure shows AT&T’s broad-ranging device strategy starting to reap rewards. It is behind Verizon in LTE, but has been more ambitious in pursuing new types of gadgets to attach to its HSPA+ systems. Q4 not only revealed smartphone growth but saw the addition of 442,000 iPad and Android tablets, plus record connections of non-phone devices with embedded wireless, such as ereaders, security systems and machine-to-machine products. Other growth areas were prepaid accounts, especially on the tablets, and the reseller channel.

The company reported total wireless revenue of $15.2bn for the quarter, up 9.9% year-on-year. Its wireless service revenue increased by 9.6% to $13.8bn. Wireless data revenue was $4.9bn, up 27.4% year-on-year.

AT&T refers to “integrated devices” as a key measure – these are “handsets with Qwerty or virtual keyboards in addition to voice functionality.” More than 7.4m contract integrated devices were sold in Q4, including 4.1m iPhone activations, and the total also included “the second largest quarterly number of upgrades in the company’s history”. At the end of the year, 61% of AT&T’s 68m contract subscribers had integrated devices, up from 46.8% a year earlier. The average ARPU for these devices is 1.7 times that of the “non-integrated” device base, and churn levels are also “significantly lower than for other postpaid subscribers”.

However, integrated devices bring higher subsidy levels and AT&T’s wireless operating income margin was down to 22.9%, from 25.9% a year earlier. The carrier said this reflected increased costs associated with integrated device activations and high customer upgrade levels, partly offset by improved operating efficiencies and ARPU growth from its integrated device users.

Meanwhile, AT&T’s smaller HSPA rival, T-Mobile, has been the poor relation among US cellcos for too long and its CEO Philipp Humm has been making a series of aggressive pronouncements on its turnaround plan. The latest is a goal of overtaking Sprint as number three mobile carrier by 2015.

Humm said the objective could be achieved by organic growth, with an acquisition unnecessary. However, without reviving the intermittently popular idea of TMo actually merging with Sprint, the target looks hard to reach – Sprint had 48.8m subscribers at the end of the third quarter, while its smaller rival had 33.8m. And Sprint has an advanced 4G strategy via the Clearwire joint venture, while TMo is short on spectrum and forced to present its HSPA+ network as ‘4G’.

Pages: 1 | 2

COMMENTS

No comments yet. Be the first to add a comment!

Carrier Broadband Performance: Africa & Middle East
Carriers are using mobile broadband as their weapon of choice in the fight against the commoditization of voice and falling ARPU. This...

Voice over LTE: Market Analysis and Forecasts
VoLTE offer unique advantages in lowering a carrier's voice infrastructure economics and promises to improve voice quality, device...