T-Mobile CEO John Legere has developed a habit of calling AT&T and Verizon “Dumb and Dumber,” after the 1990’s comedy movie, and is holding a “championship” of sorts to determine which of the two is “Dumber” for the time being. Legere has prepared an infographic showing excerpts from the past quarter for both rival carriers, highlighting what he sees as poor business decisions. While AT&T is currently working on outing its Q2 report as of this writing, Verizon won’t be publishing its report until Thursday. Once that happens, Legere says that he will announce this quarter’s “Dumber” on social media. T-Mobile’s own Q2 report, meanwhile, indicates great performance for the quarter, including over a million postpaid net adds and churn figures low enough to set company records.
Earning the title of “Dumber” in this championship doesn’t depend solely on financial performance, as Legere’s infographic shows. Factors being considered this time around include postpaid customer loss, revenues, streaming, business strategy missteps, network hype, and how the companies are approaching the growing din of merger & acquisition activity that’s slowly overtaking the wireless market. In the infographic, Legere pokes fun at T-Mobile’s larger rivals by pointing to things like Verizon’s Go90 streaming service and Oath initiative consisting of buying out Yahoo and AOL, as well as AT&T’s mentions of 5G Evolution and DIRECTV NOW. According to Legere, none of these, among other things, lived up to their promise. Legere also includes postpaid net losses and service revenues for both companies, two categories that T-Mobile has won out over the two in the past, and mentions that he expects T-Mobile to handily best them in when the Q2 reports begin to surface.
Legere gave the title to Verizon last quarter, and took a moment before presenting the infographic to shed some light on how the carrier earned that title. According to Legere, Verizon’s offering up of unlimited data last quarter was a concession to an industry movement, and was designed specifically to “save the quarter.” After the earnings call for Q1, Verizon held a shareholder conference call to discuss the results and the future, which Legere referred to as “mea culpa,” which roughly translates to accepting blame for a wrongdoing and apologizing.
