T-Mobile US claimed the industry’s best customer growth and revenue growth during the fourth quarter. The carrier added 2.1 million net customers and grew service revenue by 11% year-on-year. 1.2 million of T-Mobile’s net adds were branded postpaid subscribers and 933,000 were branded postpaid phone net additions.
Total revenue for T-Mobile was $10.2 billion for the quarter, up 23% versus the year-ago quarter. Net income was $390 million, up 31% versus the year-ago quarter. For all of 2016, revenue was up 16% to $37.2 billion and net income was up 99% to $1.5 billion.
“We’re the only wireless carrier who had double digit service revenue growth, overall growth, customer growth,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere said on CNBC. “The real story is we’ve differentiated ourselves for three years, so for three years we have dominated service revenue growth and customer growth.”
T-Mobile said it currently provides LTE coverage to 314 million people, and plans to cover 320 million people by year-end 2017. The carrier said said it continues to add new spectrum to increase coverage, and re-farming existing spectrum and implementing new technology to augment capacity.
When it comes to LTE coverage, Verizon Wireless is still the dominant U.S. carrier, but T-Mobile and Verizon are neck and neck when it comes to network speed. During the first half of 2016, OpenSignal’s LTE network speed tests showed Verizon posting average download speeds of 15.94 Mbps and T-Mobile posting speeds of 16.28 Mbps.
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