AT&T adds 1.2 million smartphones to its network, account for 93% of postpaid sales
AT&T had a pretty good fourth quarter by pretty much every metric you can imagine. Revenues are up, subscriptions are up and the company added 1.2 million smartphones to its network. Those massive smartphone sales show that the market is continuing to accelerate, even as it nears saturation. And those sales probably won't start to significantly drop off until AT&T finishes transitioning its customers to LTE. Currently, just over half of its smartphone customers are on the higher speed network. Smartphones account for 93 percent of AT&T's postpaid sales, and while the company added 566,000 postpaid subscribers during the quarter, prepaid customers declined by 32,000. Still, that drop is but a pittance for a company that has 110 million total customers on its wireless books. And its Next program seems to be off to a solid start as it attracted 1 million customers and accounted for 15 percent of postpaid upgrades.
U-Verse also saw slow, but steady growth as it added 630,000 internet subscribers and 194,000 new TV customers. Those gains were partially offset by the business side of its wireline operations, which continues to struggle. There, revenues were down 3.4 percent over last year, but there are glimmers of hope. AT&T did manage to add 78,000 business U-Verse customers, and growth of its "advanced" business products such as VPN, cloud and hosting services outpaced the previous year.
