Strategy Analytics released its Q1 2010 metrics report for the U.S. Wireless carriers and it paints an interesting picture of the mobile landscape stateside. As expected, Verizon and AT&T led the pack with 92.8 million and 86.9 million customers, but were pretty much neck and neck where it really counts with churn, service revenue, data percentage of service revenue and ARPU being fairly similar when scaled. T-Mobile and Sprint showed a slight decline with each losing tens of thousands customers and reporting churns more than double that of Verizon and AT&T. Despite losing more customers than T-Mobile, Sprint still had the upper hand in service revenue, data percentage of service revenue and ARPU. Those were the figures for the big and medium players, so hit the jump to see how the little guys did.
US Cellular led the way with the third lowest churn rate (1.91%) and the highest ARPU ($52.42) amongst all U.S. carriers. It didn’t lose customers, but it wasn’t gaining them either adding a paltry 6,000 new subs. This small growth may change this summer as the regional carrier expects to add the Android-powered HTC Desire and the Samsung Acclaim to its lineup. MetroPCS, Leap Wireless and Clearwire also performing modestly having each added tens of thousands of subscribers and maintaining an ARPU that ranged from $37.96 to $42.77. The black sheep of the small-time carriers turned out to be Cincinnati Bell which lost 10,000 customers and had 3.3% churn.
