T-Mobile Losing Customers to iPhone -- To ATT, To Verizon, To Sprint

For newbies: in addition to the Bakken, I enjoy following the information industry and Apple, Inc., in addition to the Bakken, and will blog about them occasionally.

I can't remember if I blogged this, but at the time of the proposed ATT-T-Mobile merger I said that it was a win-win for ATT. Even if the Justice Department killed the merger (just as the administration killed the Keystone XL), the protracted "dance" would result in customers leaving T-Mobile. Those customers really had only two choices in the states: ATT and Verizon. Sprint is an option, but it's a niche player in the big scheme of things. And sure enough, ATT and Verizon (and Sprint) are taking customers from T-Mobile.

Customers have been leaving T-Mobile USA, the country's No. 4 cellphone company, for the last two years. Now that all three of the bigger carriers have the iPhone, that stream has turned into a flood.

The company on Thursday said it lost a net 526,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter. Worse, it lost a net 802,000 subscribers on contract-based plans, which are the most lucrative. That's an unheard-of figure for an industry that was characterized by rapid growth for more than a decade.

T-Mobile, a Bellevue, Wash.-based subsidiary of Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG, is now losing subscribers from contract-based plans faster than regular phone companies are losing landline customers.

My hunch: T-Mobile is essentially "gone" as a "national carrier" by this time next year.  ATT carried the water for ATT/Verizon but ATT will benefit nicely. This movie has played several times before, but with different players in different sectors, the most notable being the movie rental industry some years ago.