It turns out that T-Mobile could actually be doing better than any other carrier, in a couple of important metrics. The Consumer Intelligence Research Partners shared their analysis of the U.S. wireless industry's numbers, and some surprising things came up. The CIRP estimates for the first quarter of 2016 indicate that T-Mobile was the only major American wireless carrier to gain significantly more subscribers than they lost. You can see these numbers in the screen-cap above.
These numbers indicate that T-Mobile’s retention rate is actually on par with AT&T and Verizon; however, the big takeaway is that T-Mo is adding new customers at a much faster pace than the others are. These numbers also indicate that T-Mobile posted a 42% subscriber gain who were moving from other carriers, but Verizon posted only a 14% gain, while AT&T only posted a 10% gain. Here's a quote from CIRP founder Josh Lowitz,
“Once again, T-Mobile showed it can attract significant numbers of new customers, while retaining its current ones. It attracted new customers from other carriers at an astonishing rate, attracting another 42% of their base of existing customers who activated a phone in the quarter. Sprint also gained a significant percentage of customers relative to its base, but lost almost as many. AT&T and Verizon saw existing customer losses slightly exceed gains, and only with the addition of first time phone buyers, did they grow slightly.”
It's definitely worth noting that CIRP's estimates are based on a sample size of around 500 subscribers, so there is significant room for margin of error. Despite that, CIRP has one of the best reputations in the industry for solid and reliable predictive data. What do you folks think these numbers mean (if anything)?
