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Nov. 6, 2009

T-Mobile USA is certainly feeling the effects of some pretty big competition. The wireless carrier lost almost 80,000 mobile customers in the third quarter, leaving it with just a tad over 33.3 million cell phone customers.

Overall, its contract churn rate stood at about 2.4 percent in the third quarter, up from 2.2 percent in the second quarter.

T-Mobile blamed the increase in customer defections in part to "competitive intensity, including handset innovation, and the seasonal impact from the back-to-school window of opportunity."

In a statement, President and CEO Robert Dotson said that over six months, the wireless carrier will have almost doubled its high-speed coverage with the goal of reaching 200 million consumers by the end of this year.

T-Mobile says its entire 3G network will be HSPA 7.2 Mbps-enabled by the end of this year.

Two months ago, T-Mobile launched a trial of HSPA+ technology with a maximum download speed of up to 21 Mbps in Philadelphia.

The wireless carrier says 2.8 million 3G-capable converged devices (such as the T-Mobile MyTouchTM, T-Mobile G1 and the T-Mobile Dash 3G) were on its network at the end of the third quarter.

Overall, net income for the third quarter was $417 million compared with $425 million in the second quarter and $442 million in the third quarter of last year.

ARPU (average revenue per user) was $47 in the third quarter, down from $48 in the second quarter and $52 in the year-ago quarter. Data services revenue represented 21.1 percent of blended ARPU, or $10 per customer, which was up from $8.90 per customer a year ago.

T-Mobile added that it has cleared up some service problems that were interfering with mobile calls and text messaging for about 5 percent of its users.

Outages have been mostly reported from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

The average cost of acquiring a new customer was about $290 in the third quarter, which was in line with the third quarter of last year.

In the next coming weeks, other wireless carriers will be coming with their own numbers. It will be interesting to analyze those numbers and to compare them with T-Mobile.

After all, is this a new trend developing?

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Source: T-Mobile.