NEW YORK—Verizon Wireless continued its domination of the postpaid wireless market and outpaced larger rival Cingular Wireless L.L.C. in net customer additions during the third quarter.
Verizon Wireless brought in 1.9 million net subscribers for the quarter, compared with Cingular’s 1.4 million net additions. Verizon Wireless’ churn rate was 1.24 percent overall, a slight decrease from the 1.3 percent churn rate of 2005’s third quarter. Among retail postpaid customers, the churn rate was 0.95 percent. The No. 2 national carrier ended the quarter with 56.7 million customers, an increase of about 15 percent from the same time last year.
Verizon Wireless is now claiming the title of “largest U.S. wireless company by revenue;” the carrier brought in $9.9 billion in revenue for the quarter, an increase of more than 18 percent compared with the same period last year. In comparison, Cingular brought in $9.6 billion in revenue and No. 3 operator Sprint Nextel Corp. claimed revenues for the third quarter of $9.1 billion.
Verizon Wireless reaped average revenue per user of $50.59, up less than 1 percent from 2005’s third quarter, but an increase of almost 2 percent sequentially. Retail service ARPU was $51.21, up 1.2 percent compared with the third quarter of last year. Data revenues made up more than 14 percent of all service revenues, nearly doubling from the 8.4 percent of the third quarter of 2005. Verizon Wireless said it has nearly 32 million data customers, a jump of 43 percent from the year-ago period, and that more than half of its data revenue growth came from non-messaging services.
