T-Mobile USA's Q4 for 2006 showed most of the carrier's financial metrics holding steady while net-adds for new subscribers pushed the carrier's total customer base to more than 25 million. Here's how its Q4 breaks down:
Subscriber base: Q4 2006 brought in 901,000 net new customers for T-Mobile USA, up from 802,000 net new customers in Q3 2006 and down from the 1.39 million added in Q4 2005. New postpay subs made up 87 percent of the Q4 growth, which is up from 66 percent in Q4 2005.
ARPU: Postpay ARPU increased slightly year-over-year but echoed the same $56 as recent quarters--that's still up from Q4 in 2005, which saw $54. Data ARPU accounted for 12.5 percent of blended ARPU, or about $6.50 per customer in Q4 2006, compared to 11.3 percent or $5.90 in Q3 2006 and 9.1 percent or $4.80 in Q4 2005. The total number of SMS and MMS messages increased to almost 13 billion in the fourth quarter of 2006, compared to 9.9 billion in the third quarter of 2006 and 5.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005.
Churn: Postpay churn declined to 2.1 percent for Q4 2006, down from 2.3 percent in Q3 of last year. Blended churn (postpay and prepay) was 2.9 percent for the quarter, which is the same as it was in 2005 and slightly down from 3.0 percent churn rates of Q3 2006.
Spectrum: The carrier also noted that it has paid $4.18 billion for parts of the advanced wireless services (AWS) spectrum that will more than double its average spectrum holdings in the top 100 U.S. markets.
For more on T-Mobile USA's Q4:
- see this company press release
- and compare the results with Sprint's Q4
- AT&T/Cingular's Q4 netted the carrier 2.4 million subs
- check out Verizon Wireless' Q4 results, too