Boston, MA 06/06/2014 (wallstreetpr) – AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) climbed at the second position in the race of number of wireless subscribers in the U.S., as per the industry analyst Chetan Sharma. AT&T is giving a very close competition to Verizon, which is still ruling at the #1 position. It is important to note that despite having different kinds of subscribers in a comprehensive subscriber count, both these carriers still had around 34% market share of overall U.S. subscriber market by the end of Q1 2014. AT&T includes virtual network subscribers and M2M subscribers, which Verizon lacks. Other major U.S. carriers such as T-Mobile and Sprint had 14% and 16% market share of the U.S. subscribers, respectively.
Reason for AT&T’s Success
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), in March 2014, acquired Leap Wireless, the prepaid wireless service provider. This is said to be a possible reason of AT&T catching up with Verizon because Leap Wireless had a prepaid subscribers’ base of around 4.54 million by the end of Q1 2014.
Verizon’s Market Position
It is worth noticing that it has happened for the first time that Verizon shared its top position in U.S. subscriber market with someone, ever since its Alltel acquisition in the year 2009. However, considering only the business and retail subscribers, Verizon is still leading with 103 million users, while AT&T lags much behind with around 85 million users.
Verizon has already pushed behind AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) and T-Mobile while attracting new subscribers in past few quarters. Verizon had introduced upgraded 4G network earlier in 2014 in order to attract new users and retain the existing ones. It had also earlier launched upgraded LTE network, XLTE in more than 250 cities as well as towns. XLTE is said to offer two times the speed of existing 4G network, but this depends largely on the location of a user. Faster XLTE will help Verizon in retaining its existing customer base and also maintaining the market share in competitive U.S. wireless market.
