T-Mobile has been on a tear in the past couple of years. From adding millions of new connections each quarter, to tripling their profit in the fourth quarter and keeping their customers. T-Mobile announced their preliminary numbers back in January, which were largely the same as what was announced today on their earnings call. However, T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere also noted that his company took about 108% of the postpaid phone growth in the year. That means not only did they take all of the growth, but also took some from their competitors. In a time where growth in smartphones is pretty tough to come by, that’s a pretty spectacular number there.
The company’s fourth quarter results makes it their sixth straight quarter of having over 1 million branded postpaid net customer adds, also the sixth time in eight quarters that the total net customer adds were over 2 million. Where is T-Mobile’s momentum coming from? Simple. Their aggressive promotions as well as their Uncarrier strategy of eliminating pain points for their customers. T-Mobile’s execs also noted on the earnings call today that their prepaid brand MetroPCS has been doing outstanding, and they are hoping to continue that trend. Some of the pain points that T-Mobile have eliminated is streaming music using up your data with Music Freedom, streaming video using up your data with Binge On, roaming in other countries, and many others.
On top of their pricing and promotions, T-Mobile has also been rapidly increasing their network coverage. Having doubled their LTE footprint in 2015 alone and they aren’t done. Their CTO, Neville Ray stated during their earnings call today that they are “rapidly deploying both Wideband LTE to add capacity” as well as Extended Range to improve coverage using their Band 12 spectrum. This is something that is going to help with coverage as well as data speeds for everyone. Ray also noted that they are working to get more 700MHz A Block spectrum, which would cover roughly an additional 48 million people in the US. That would increase their current band 12 coverage from 210 million to 258 million people.
There is also the incentive auction coming up next month. Where T-Mobile is hoping to get a decent amount of 600MHz spectrum, but they aren’t putting all their eggs in that basket, as they are looking to get more 700MHz spectrum as well.