Category Archives: Wireless

AT&T, Earnings, Q3 2016, Sprint, T-Mobile, Tracfone, Verizon, Wireless

The US Wireless Market in Q3 2016

November 17, 2016 Jan Dawson

One of the markets I follow most closely is the US wireless market. Every quarter, I collect dozens of metrics for the five largest operators, churn out well over a hundred charts, and provide analysis and insight to my clients on this topic. Today, I’m going to share just a few highlights from my US wireless deck, which is available on a standalone basis or as part of the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service, along with some additional analysis. If you’d like more information about any of this, please visit the Jackdaw Research website or contact me directly.

Postpaid phones – little growth, with T-Mobile gobbling up most of it

The mainstay of the US wireless industry has always been postpaid phones, and it continues to account for over half the connections and far more than half the revenues and profits. But at this stage, there’s relatively little growth left in the market – the four main carriers added fewer than two million new postpaid phone customers in the past year, a rate that has been slowing fairly steadily:

This was always inevitable as phone penetration began to reach saturation, and as the portion of the US population with good credit became particularly saturated. But that reality means that future growth either can’t come from postpaid phones, or has to come through market share gains almost exclusively.

In that context, then, T-Mobile has very successfully pursued the latter strategy, winning a disproportionate share of phone customers from its major competitors over the last several years. The chart below shows postpaid phone net adds by carrier:

As you can see, T-Mobile is way out in front for every quarter but Q2 2014, when AT&T preemptively moved many of its customers onto new cheaper pricing plans. AT&T has been negative for much of the last two years at this point, while Sprint has finally returned to growth during the same period, and Verizon has seen lower adds than historically. What’s striking is that T-Mobile and Sprint have achieved their relatively strong performances in quite different ways. Whereas Sprint’s improved performance over the past two years has been almost entirely about reducing churn – holding onto its existing customers better – T-Mobile has combined reduced churn with dramatically better customer acquisition.

The carriers don’t report postpaid phone gross adds directly, but we can derive total postpaid gross adds from net adds and churn, and I find the chart below particularly striking:

What that chart shows is that T-Mobile is adding far more new customers in proportion to its existing base than any of the other carriers. Sprint is somewhat close, but AT&T and Verizon are far behind. But the chart also shows that this source of growth for T-Mobile has slowed down in recent quarters, likely as a direct effect of the slowing growth in the market overall. And that slowing gross adds number has translated into lower postpaid phone net adds over the past couple of years too:

That’s a bit of an unconventional chart, but is shows T-Mobile’s postpaid phone net adds on an annual basis, so you can see how each year’s numbers compare to previous years’. As you can see, for most of 2015 and 2016, these net adds were down year on year. The exceptions were again around Q2 2014, and then the quarter that’s just ended – Q3 2016, when T-Mobile pipped its Q3 2015 number ever so slightly. The reason? Likely the launch of T-Mobile One, which I wrote about previously. The big question is whether T-Mobile will return to the declining pattern we saw previously when the short-term effects of the launch of T-Mobile One wear off.

Smartphone sales – slowing on postpaid, holding up in prepaid

All of this naturally has a knock-on effect on sales of smartphones, along with the adoption of the new installment plans and leasing, which are breaking the traditional two-year upgrade cycle. The number of new smartphones in the postpaid base has been slowing dramatically over the last couple of years too:

But the other thing that’s been happening is that upgrade rates have been slowing down significantly too. From a carrier reporting perspective, the number that matters here is the percentage of postpaid devices being upgraded in the quarter. This number has declined quite a bit in the last couple of years too, across all the carriers, as shown in the cluster of charts below:

The net result of this is fewer smartphones being sold, and the number of postpaid smartphones sold has fallen year on year for each of the last four quarters. Interestingly, the prepaid sales rate is holding up a little better, likely because smartphone penetration is lower in the prepaid market. There were also signs in Q3 that the new iPhones might be driving a slightly stronger upgrade cycle than last year, which could be good for iPhone sales in Q4 if that trend holds up through the first full quarter of sales.

What’s interesting is that the upgrade rates are very different between carriers, and T-Mobile in particular captures far more than its fair share of total sales, while AT&T captures far less than it ought to. The chart below compares the share of the smartphone base across the four major carriers with the share of smartphone sales:

As you can see, T-Mobile’s share of sales is far higher than its share of the base, while AT&T’s (and to a lesser extent Verizon’s) is far lower.

Growth beyond phones

So, if postpaid phone growth is slowing, growth has to come from somewhere else, and that’s very much been the case. Tablets had been an important source of growth for some of the carriers for a few years, but their aggressive pursuit has begun to cost them dearly now, at least in the case of Sprint and Verizon. Both carriers had promotions on low-cost tablets two years ago and are now finding that buyers don’t feel the need to keep the relationship going now their contracts are up. Both are seeing substantial tablet churn as a result, and overall tablet net adds are down by a huge amount over the past year:

There may be some recovery in tablet growth as Verizon and Sprint work their way through their churn issues, but I suspect this slowing growth is also reflective of broader industry trends for tablets, which appear to be stalling. Still in postpaid, there’s been a little growth in the “other” category, too, but that’s mostly wireless-based home phone services, and it’s not going to drive much growth overall. So, the industry likely needs to look beyond traditional postpaid services entirely.

Prepaid isn’t growing much faster

The next big category for the major operators is prepaid, which has gone through an interesting evolution over the last few years. It began as the option for people who couldn’t qualify for postpaid service because of poor credit scores, and was very much the red-headed stepchild of the US wireless industry, in contrast to many other markets where it came to dominate. But there was a period a few years back where it began to attract customers who could have bought postpaid services but preferred the flexibility of prepaid, especially when prepaid began to achieve feature parity with postpaid. However, that ebbed again as installment plans took off on the postpaid side and made those services more flexible. Now, we’re going through yet another change as a couple of the big carriers use their prepaid brands as fighter brands, going after their competitors’ postpaid customers. The result is that those two carriers are seeing very healthy growth in prepaid, while the other operators are struggling. In the chart below, I’ve added in TracFone, which is the largest prepaid operator in the US, but not a carrier (it uses the other operators’ networks on a wholesale basis):

As you can see, AT&T (mostly through its Cricket brand) and T-Mobile (mostly through its MetroPCS brand) have risen to the top, even as Sprint has gone rapidly downhill and Verizon and TracFone have mostly bounced around roughly at or below zero. There is some growth here, but it’s all being captured by the two operators, while the others are treading water or slowly going under.

Connected devices – the fastest-growing category

The fastest-growing category in the US wireless market today is what are called connected devices. For the uninitiated, that probably requires something of an explanation, since you might think of all wireless connections as being connected devices. The best way to think about the connected devices category is that these are connections sold for non-traditional things, so not phones and mostly not tablets either, but rather connected cars, smart water meters, fleet tracking, and all kinds of other connections which are more about objects than people. The one exception is the wireless connections that get bundled into some Amazon Kindle devices as part of the single upfront purchase, where the monthly bill goes to Amazon and not the customer.

This category has been growing faster than all the others – the chart below shows net adds for the four major categories we’ve discussed so far across the five largest operators, and you can see that connected devices are well out in front over the past year or so:

Growth in this category, in turn, is dominated by two operators – AT&T and Sprint, as shown in the chart below (note that Verizon doesn’t report net adds in this category publicly):

At AT&T, many of these net adds are in the connected car space, where it has signed many of the major car manufacturers as customers. The rest of AT&T’s and most of Sprint’s are a mix of enterprise and industrial applications, along with the Kindle business at AT&T. T-Mobile also has a much smaller presence here, and Verizon has a legacy business as the provider of GM’s OnStar services as well as a newer IoT-focused practice.

Though the connection growth here is healthier than the other segments, the revenue per user is much lower, in some cases only single digit dollars a month. However, this part of the market is likely to continue to grow very rapidly in the coming years even as growth in the core postpaid and prepaid markets evaporates, so it’s an important place for the major carriers to invest for future growth.

pricing, T-Mobile, Wireless

Uncovering the Reasons for T-Mobile’s One Launch

August 18, 2016 Jan Dawson

T-Mobile today announced its latest Un-Carrier move, Un-Carrier 12. The crux of the plan is new unlimited plans under the T-Mobile One brand. The headline from T-Mobile is about simplicity and unlimited for everyone, but the upshot of this new pricing is that the base price for postpaid at T-Mobile just went up quite significantly. And the reason for the move is that Un-Carrier is losing momentum and T-Mobile needs to boost growth again.

The context – slowing growth

I’ve written about this a little bit in the past, but here is the context: T-Mobile is losing momentum with its Un-Carrier moves. Two key metrics – postpaid phone net adds and porting ratios from other carriers – have both been falling.

The chart below shows postpaid phone net adds on a quarterly basis, with one line for each year, so you can see how each quarter compares to the year-ago quarter:

As you can see, the 2016 quarters so far are below Q1 and Q2 in 2015, while Q2 was also below 2013, and Q1 was below 2014. In 2015, every quarter but Q2 was below 2014 net adds. So there’s a very clear trend now that T-Mobile is adding fewer phones each quarter than a year earlier. If you strip out the exceptional Q2 2014, when phone net adds dipped, the trend is now clear for a year and a half.

Moving to porting ratios, which T-Mobile reports on its earnings calls, the trend there is fairly clear too. It reports porting ratios against each of the other three major carriers, as well as an overall porting ratio most quarters. An average of the three individual carriers’ porting ratios tends to track fairly closely against the overall porting ratio, so I’ve included that in the second chart below to fill in some gaps:

That second chart is probably the easiest one to read, because the trend is so clear. The overall rate peaked in Q3 2014 at just under 2.5, and has fallen since to under 1.5. Against individual carriers, the biggest change in the last two years has been Sprint, whose troubles two and three years ago allowed T-Mobile to capture massive numbers of subscribers, but whose recent improvements have made that cherrypicking much harder. I’ll stop here with the context, but it should be clear by now that T-Mobile is having less and less success with adding new customers and winning subscribers from competitors as time goes on, as its various Un-Carrier moves offer diminishing returns.

T-Mobile One – simplicity at a cost

T-Mobile is selling simplicity here – that’s the headline. It will have one plan going forward, and that plan will be unlimited, with a pricing structure that’s extremely easy to understand. In the context of recent pricing moves from competitors, that’s admirable, and attractive to customers. Unlimited is the simplest message of all, and has huge appeal in the peace of mind it provides.

However, this change is coming at a significant price premium. T-Mobile’s current plans start at $50 for a single line, with 2GB of data. A second line at that price costs $30 additionally, for $80 total. A third line is only $10, so $90 in total, and the same pricing continues for additional lines. Let’s compare this to the new pricing which will be offered from September 6, which will be the only pricing available for new customers:

The headline here is that, for the plans at 2GB and 6GB per line, the new pricing is more expensive, while for the plans at 10GB and the Unlimited plans, the new pricing is the same or cheaper. That’s significant, because T-Mobile says their most popular plans are the 6GB and 10GB plans, so a good chunk of their customers would be paying more on this plan, while many others would be paying roughly the same or slightly less. This helps to explain why T-Mobile says it doesn’t expect a meaningful change to its ARPU.

But of course for new customers, the starting point is now $70 rather than $50, meaning that the entry point for new customers has gone up by $20 for a single line. Put another way, competitors who previously matched T-Mobile’s entry pricing now undercut it by $20 (and Sprint has just launched new pricing today). So, even though the headline is all about simplicity and the gift of unlimited, the reality is that customers coming in at the low end will end up paying more than they would have before, and potentially more than they would at competitors.

The reason for the shift to unlimited

Here’s the rub, though, with this whole thing: T-Mobile introduced BingeOn, its video throttling strategy, a year ago. That did two things: it made it much more economical for T-Mobile to offer bigger and unlimited data plans, because it cut bandwidth usage dramatically; but it also meant that many customers who would otherwise have been on the standard trajectory of ever increasing usage pushing them into ever bigger data buckets instead went backwards. The same consumption of video suddenly drove far lower usage. The result is that T-Mobile doesn’t have the same driver of ARPU that almost every other carrier does, because it kneecapped data growth.

There’s an analog here with what happened with all the carriers a few years back when it became clear that voice and text usage were no longer going to grow as they had in the past, while data was going to continue to grow rapidly. At that point, the best move from a financial perspective was to move away from metered voice and text, because there was no longer upside for charging for every bit of usage, and instead only downside as usage dropped. On the other hand, it made sense to begin metering data and move away from unlimited plans, because that’s where the usage growth was, and where the future revenue opportunity would be too.

What T-Mobile is doing here is finding an alternative way to move people to higher tiered data plans even though they no longer need to. The appeal of unlimited is such that people will move to it even if they’re not close to hitting their current data cap, just for peace of mind. It’s even more likely that a T-Mobile customer would actually need to move to a higher plan when you consider that T-Mobile has offered Data Stash, which allows customers to roll over a data allowance over many months.

The cost of unlimited

T-Mobile made much today of the fact that its network was designed for unlimited, and that competitors’ networks were not. But that’s really another way of saying two things: T-Mobile is far smaller than its two major competitors, and so has far fewer customers on an national network, using far less data in aggregate; and with BingeOn, it’s reduced the data usage associated with video consumption by about two thirds.

But it’s not really about the network per se – it’s about the cost. Unlimited customers (for the most part) don’t actually use dramatic amounts of bandwidth in the average month. It’s likely that many of them would fit fine in the 5-20GB buckets offered by the carriers. But suddenly taking the limits off all customers risks significant increases in usage because it changes behavior dramatically, and that could incur significant costs in increased data capacity. So that’s a high-risk move, and it’s why most carriers don’t do this.

But anyone can offer unlimited if they price it right, which is why you see T-Mobile pricing it at roughly the same price as 10GB plans under its previous options. It’s also why streaming video up to 4K costs an additional $25 per line per month. There’s a cost to unlimited, and if it’s truly unlimited rather than being throttled to 480p, it costs more. This is really just a question of pricing, but that’s why T-Mobile’s pricing is going up here – it’s not magic, just economics.

A sign of confidence

The other thing that’s going on here is that T-Mobile is getting more confident in the performance of its network. One of the interesting facets of pricing in the US mobile market is that pricing power largely depends on perceptions of network performance. This is why Sprint can run campaigns offering 1% worse performance than Verizon at half the price and yet doesn’t see a massive influx of customers from its competitor. Network quality, but more importantly perception of network quality, requires certain carriers to charge less for the same services in order to win customers, while other carriers can charge more on the basis of their perceived better network quality.

Both Sprint and T-Mobile (and especially T-Mobile) have been increasing the quality of their networks in recent years, and perception on the T-Mobile side is finally starting to catch up with reality. It’s absolutely a sign of the company’s increased confidence in both its actual network and perceptions of its network that it’s willing to raise prices at this point. It clearly feels like it’s more able to compete with the big guys on network, and so can move its pricing more in line with theirs. That Sprint instead focuses on that 1% difference and 50% lower pricing is a sign that it’s not there yet, by a long stretch (leaving aside the wisdom of highlighting the worse performance of your network in national advertising).

AT&T, Net neutrality, Netflix, Verizon, Wireless

Why Netflix is Wrong to Throttle AT&T and Verizon Customers

March 24, 2016 Jan Dawson

Today, it emerged that Netflix has been throttling video streams for those customers which are using the AT&T and Verizon Wireless networks (but not T-Mobile and Sprint customers) to stream its content. From what we know so far, the carriers were unaware of this, and are understandably upset. Netflix’s justification for this partial throttling, according to a Wall Street Journal article, was that “historically those two companies [T-Mobile and Sprint] have had more consumer-friendly policies.” And the overly-simplistic value judgement implied by that quote gets at the heart of why this is wrong.

There are several issues here. Firstly, this treatment is discriminatory but not discriminating – what I mean by that is that the Netflix policy discriminates between networks but treats all users on each network the same, regardless of what data plan they’re actually on. For example, as of December 2015, 11% of AT&T’s smartphone customers are still on unlimited plans. Since December, AT&T has begun selling unlimited plans again to certain customers who take DirecTV and AT&T service. As such, over 1 in 10 AT&T customers have unlimited plans, and that number is growing, but Netflix’s policy takes no account of this. The same applies to Verizon customers. By definition, Netflix doesn’t know which plans users are on. Perhaps I’m one of those unlimited customers at Verizon, or I have a 30GB plan from AT&T, but I’m treated the same as if I’m on a 1GB plan regardless. At the same time, not all Sprint or T-Mobile customers are on unlimited plans either.

Netflix hasn’t been transparent here until it was called out, either with customers or with the carriers. That’s problematic for two reasons – users who aren’t aware have no control either, and Netflix should have given users a choice. The other problem is that users will have assumed degraded video was the fault of poor network performance, which negatively impacts perceptions of the carrier rather than Netflix itself when video is throttled.

Netflix’s justification in a hurriedly put out but opaque blog post is that customers don’t mind, but it has no way of knowing how users really feel, because they haven’t been aware. To be sure, some users are very concerned about data caps, and would choose overages. Simply giving users a choice would have solved the problem without the underhanded approach Netflix has taken. It’s uncharacteristic for a company that’s been so bullish about transparency and fair treatment (and been a huge proponent of net neutrality). Netflix’s current approach has many of the same shortcomings as the original implementation of T-Mobile’s BingeOn plan, which also throttled video without users’ permission. Deliberately degrading video performance without user knowledge or consent is wrong, no matter who does it.

That WSJ quote at the beginning sums up what’s really going on here – except that what Netflix really means is that some carriers have been less friendly to over-the-top video providers by metering bandwidth their customers use. This Netflix policy has very little to do with better serving customers and everything to do with better serving Netflix by getting people to watch more of its videos. If it really wanted to serve customers better, it would make this policy explicit, transparent, and opt-in.

AT&T, AT&T Mobility, Consumer, Enterprise, Q3 2015, Wireless

Diving into AT&T’s Consumer and Business Mobility businesses

November 11, 2015 Jan Dawson

AT&T recently restructured its reporting segments to reflect the fact that it now has all its business-focused activities in a single division – AT&T Business Solutions. This division includes its business-focused mobile activities, while a separate division – Consumer Mobility – houses its consumer-focused (and wholesale) mobile activities. In an admirable bit of transparency, AT&T is actually providing both overall results for the same combined AT&T Mobility business that used to exist, but also some breakdowns for both Business Mobility and Consumer Mobility separately. This provides some interesting opportunities to see the differences between these two businesses, and I’ve spent some time over the last couple of days dissecting these two segments.

A business in two halves

First of all, let’s look at how the business splits between Business and Consumer Mobility. The first chart below shows the revenue split between the two, while the second shows the subscriber base split:

As you can see from that revenue chart, this is a business split almost exactly in two, with the division between the two right around 50/50 depending on the quarter. However, as the subscriber base chart shows, the balance in subscriber numbers is shifting rapidly towards the Business side, which had 57% of AT&T Mobility subscribers in Q3, up from just 51% in Q1 2014. We can also logically conclude – and I’ll expand on this below – that Business Mobility has lower revenue per user than Consumer Mobility.

ARPUs are very different by business

Sadly, AT&T doesn’t give us a detailed split of average revenue per user by segment, but it does give us some numbers directly, and also gives us enough other information to derive others. The chart below shows average revenue per user for a variety of the sub-segments in the new reporting structure:
As you can see, the highest ARPU is that associated with postpaid subscribers on the Consumer Mobility side, at a little over $60 per month per subscriber, while the lowest ARPU belongs to the “Other Service” line on the Consumer Mobility side. That Other Services line is mostly made up of wholesale subscribers, such as those belonging to MVNOs using the AT&T network, so it’s not surprising that they should be low, since AT&T just gets a small percentage of retail revenues.

However, there are also some other interesting things to note:

These numbers give us our first real insight into prepaid ARPU at AT&T in several years. AT&T has been referring to prepaid ARPUs here and there in investor briefings recently, but hasn’t given a regular figure. But it’s now clear that prepaid ARPU is around $37, and jumped quite significantly when Cricket came on board, something that only fully hit results in Q2 2014.
Business Mobility ARPU is lower than total Consumer Mobility ARPU, by a few dollars, and Consumer Mobility postpaid ARPU is higher than total postpaid ARPU for AT&T, both of which suggest that Business Mobility generates lower ARPUs for the same services than Consumer Mobility. That is, in fact, the case, since business customers often get discounts not available to consumers. Overall Business Mobility ARPU is also lower because of the large number of Connected Devices subs in the Business base, which tend to have much lower ARPUs, as you can see in the chart below:

Churn rates are lower in business than consumer

Another big difference between the two segments is churn rates. Here are the overall churn rates for Business Mobility and Consumer Mobility: This shouldn’t surprise us, since:

Business Mobility includes Connected Devices, which often have very long lifecycles and therefore very low churn on a monthly basis
Consumer Mobility includes prepaid, which has always had higher churn than postpaid.

However, even when you compare Consumer Mobility postpaid churn alone to total postpaid churn for AT&T, you can see a difference of around 15 basis points:
This also isn’t that surprising – the more lines associated with an account (whether as part of family plans or business contracts), the lower churn tends to be, because it’s more of an upheaval to move several lines (which may have different contract end dates) than to move one.

Business Mobility is one of Consumer Mobility’s largest sources of churn

One of the most interesting things about the two subscriber bases is that Business Mobility is actually taking over quite a few subscribers from Consumer Mobility each quarter. The chart below shows postpaid subscribers for both segments:This, along with the rapid growth in Connected Devices, helps to explain why Business Mobility is growing as a proportion of the total, but why is Consumer Mobility’s postpaid base shrinking so rapidly, while Business Mobility is growing quickly? At first, I wondered if this was a sign of some underlying problem in the consumer business, but it turns out it’s something rather different. This quote comes from an additional 8-K filing AT&T filed this quarter alongside its results announcement:

Our business wireless offerings allow for individual subscribers to purchase wireless services through employer-sponsored plans for a reduced price. The migration of these subscribers to the ABS segment negatively impacted consumer postpaid subscriber and service revenues growth.

Now, I don’t believe AT&T actually counts these subscribers as either churn or net adds on either side, when they’re merely transitioned from one segment to the other. But in addition to this internal churn, there is still a fairly stark difference in the postpaid net adds between the two segments: Postpaid net adds business and consumer As you can see, Business Mobility seems to have far higher net adds than Consumer Mobility, which shrank to almost zero in Q3 2015. That’s a bit of a worrying sign for AT&T, and something we’ll want to keep an eye on going forward.

Which business is more favorable for AT&T?

The ultimate question is which of these two roughly equally-sized businesses is better for AT&T. In other words, is it a good thing that AT&T is seeing some subscribers transition over from Consumer to Business? Well, one thing we haven’t looked at yet is margins, which AT&T doesn’t report directly for Business Mobility, but which we can derive based on the figures it does provide for both AT&T Mobility as a whole and the Consumer Mobility segments:

Business Mobility margins are actually a little lower than Consumer Mobility margins, by an average of roughly 2-3 percentage points most quarters. That likely reflects the lower ARPUs related to the heavier discounting that takes place on the business side. But of course, offsetting both the lower ARPUs and the slightly lower margins is the benefit of lower churn, which should help AT&T on the business side over time. The good news is that, thanks to cost cuts and efficiency gains AT&T has made recently, both sides of the business are seeing rising margins.

What we’re getting here is a unique insight into a division that’s normally totally opaque – none of the other US carriers provide this kind of split in their reporting. It would be fascinating to see a similar split for the others – T-Mobile has never really gone after the enterprise business until recently, while the other two carriers have definitely pursued it more aggressively. I suspect AT&T has the largest enterprise mobility business of the big four, but I’d love to see these details for the other carriers too.

Earnings, Q2 2015, T-Mobile, Wireless

The key to T-Mobile’s growth

July 30, 2015 Jan Dawson

T-Mobile reported its earnings this morning, and as usual lately there was a strong component of growth – across subscribers, revenues, and even average revenue per subscriber. I’m going to run through the highlights quickly, but then I’m going to drill down around what drives that growth, and how T-Mobile is able to grow at this rate even as its competitors struggle to do so.

Note: I’ve written extensively about T-Mobile before, and remain skeptical about some of the aspects of its business model and strategy, but this post will focus on the flip side of that: the undeniable growth in its business. In addition, you can find my analysis of other major tech companies’ earnings here, and you can subscribe to the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks service if you want to get a full set of charts on the major tech companies and on the US wireless, cable, satellite, and telecoms operators.

Quick growth review

The two charts below show all you really need to know about growth at T-Mobile – from stagnation and decline pre-2013, the company has turned itself around dramatically, growing subscribers at a now fairly steady pace of 15-18% per quarter, and as a result revenues have been growing too.

How does T-Mobile do it?

So, the big question becomes how T-Mobile is able to achieve this, when the other three major US carriers are not able to do so. Verizon’s year on year wireless revenue growth has been around 5-10%, AT&T’s has recently been in the low single digits, and Sprint’s has been negative for several quarters. Subscriber growth at T-Mobile’s two largest competitors – AT&T and Verizon – has been stronger, but largely driven by things other than phones, whereas T-Mobile’s growth has been almost entirely based on the traditional phone business. That’s a liability in some ways, because the base of phones in the US isn’t really growing much anymore, but at the moment T-Mobile is capturing what growth there is, while stealing subscribers from competitors. I’m going