Now that all of the wireless carriers have announced their Q1 2016 numbers, let’s take a look at how they each performed when compared to their competitors. We all know that T-Mobile added the most in the quarter with 2.2 million net adds. Followed by AT&T at 1.7 million, Verizon with 1.3 million and Sprint at 445 thousand. AT&T posted the highest ARPU at $52.70, Verizon at $47.49, Sprint at $43.97 and T-Mobile at $41.97. Surprisingly, Verizon had the lowest churn at 1.22%, followed by AT&T at 1.42%, T-Mobile 2.23% and Sprint at 2.98%.
The numbers are right about what we expected for the first quarter. Keep in mind that the first quarter of the year is typically pretty low. Considering most smartphones are announced and/or made available in March or later. Which gives them little time to sell in the first quarter. As far as subscribers go, the rankings stayed basically the same. With Verizon at number one, followed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint. T-Mobile did grow its lead over Sprint a bit, in the quarter. Making a 7 million subscriber gap between the two.
On the prepaid side, T-Mobile and AT&T added the most subscribers, with Verizon, Sprint and Tracfone actually losing prepaid customers in the quarter. This isn’t too surprising for Verizon, considering they aren’t prioritizing prepaid customers or their prepaid options. As they would rather their customers go the postpaid route. However, for Tracfone and Sprint, this is a bit more surprising. Given that just a few short quarters ago, they were the biggest prepaid carriers in the country.
Tablet net adds, like the tablet industry itself, has been decreasing quite a bit over the past 18 months. On top of the fact that many tablets aren’t selling, those that took advantage of “free” tablet promotions two years ago decided that they didn’t want to continue paying the monthly service fee for the tablet. Sprint actually lost 36,000 tablet subscribers in the quarter, Verizon dropped from 820,000 last year to 507,000 in Q1 2016. With the four carriers combined, 900,000 tablets were added. Quite the decrease from Q1 2015 which saw 2 million tablets added.
You can check out the graphs down below to see some visuals of how well these carriers stacked up against each other in the quarter.
