Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s CEO, recently spoke at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XIX Conference and said, ” We’re on pace to set a record for integrated devices.” That’s pretty amazing considering the fierce competition Verizon Wireless and Sprint have been giving each other. Stephenson went on to detail that the iPhone 4, the BlackBerry Torch, and the Samsung Captivate have been “solid drivers for the company.” AT&T’s tiered data strategy also seems to be paying off, at least in the short-term, by moving a lot of people “into the data market who had not been” before. 53% of AT&T’s postpaid subscribers use a smartphone, there are over 7 million connected devices on the network, and even around half a million iPads.
Switching gears to LTE, AT&T’s chief executive offer reiterated a lot of what the CEO of AT&T Operations said last week: AT&T will be launching LTE service for the general public by mid-2011 and will cover over 70 million subscribers by the end of the same year. This will put AT&T in a head to head battle with Verizon Wireless who intends to have over 100 million subscribers covered with LTE by the end of this year.
