Q4 and 2016 Annual Top 4 Carrier Review

Q4 2016 and End of Year Assessment of the “Top 4 Mobile Carriers”
T-Mobile attracts the most customers in 2016 while Verizon excelled in retail churn

All four carriers have finished up their earnings calls, and Compass Intelligence just completed the final assessment of Q4 2016 and the entire 2016 year, and also evaluated the comparisons to previous quarters and 2015/2016 in terms of improvements and declines. We do this each quarter to understand the subscriber and share changes, as well as evaluate the key trends taking place in the wireless industry for both consumer and B2B.  We have been tracking the quarterly metrics since 2007. Some metrics are our own internal modeling and estimates, as the market does not report in all categories.  A snapshot of Q4 2016 is below.
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Compass Intelligence compared last quarter’s results to this quarter to show which metrics showed improvement over others (denoted by + or -).

Below are additional thoughts and insights based on the quarter and annual performance:

• Summary:
  • Q1 2016 experienced the most additions of connections for 2016, while Q4 (a quarter that usually experiences decent growth due to holiday sales) added the fewest total connections compared to all 4 quarters
  • Q4 2016 quarter with about 4M new connections QoQ (includes IoT and mobile subscribers), which is about 1.2M less than what was added in Q3 2016.
  • Retail Subscribers for the Top 4 carriers reached 303.3M, or an addition of 7.7M added for the whole year
  • While Verizon maintained the lowest churn for the year at an average of .985%, AT&T followed with an average churn for 2016 at 1.08%
  • A total of 5.3M tablets were activated for the entire year (2016), with Verizon adding an overall 507K just in Q4 2016 alone.
  • Based on total connections alone, all top 4 carriers except for T-Mobile lost market share. Verizon lost almost 1% market share, while T-Mobile gained over 1% share.
  • AT&T leveraged its growth in IoT connections in 2016, and remained the market leader in IoT.

 

• REVENUE: Similar to last quarter, All carriers reported lower service revenue QoQ except for T-Mobile.
  • T-Mobile increased revenue in Q4 2016 by $122M compared to Q3 2016.
  • Combined the industry experienced a total of $546M in overall wireless service revenue in 2016
  • Total Q4 2016 mobile service revenue reached $44.3M, compared to $44.8M in Q3 2016
• POSTPAID ADDS:
  • All 4 carriers ended the quarter with positive postpaid net adds, adding 2.6M retail subscribers for the quarter
  • T-Mobile dominated with postpaid adds, being the only carrier to add more than 1M postpaid adds this quarter and in Q3, this quarter they added 1.2M postpaid subscribers
  • Verizon added 576K postpaid subscribers in Q4 2016, which is an improvement from Q3 2016
• CONNECTIONS:
  • Total industry connections reached 406.4M at the end of Q4 2016 for the top 4 carriers
  • Total industry subscriber base: 418.5M (Includes ALL MNOs and MVNOs)
  • Total smartphone subscribers=313.5M  
  • Total Connected Devices reached 67.8M for the industry.

As shown above, overall the industry added an estimated 21.5M connections in 2016 compared to 24M connections in 2015, which represents a 5.3% change from 2015. While Verizon ended the year with the most connections at 140.6M connections, T-Mobile lead overall connection adds for the year, adding over 10.2M connections in 2016 where in 2015 AT&T was the leader in overall connection additions. AT&T’s growth was primarily driven by IoT connections, adding an estimated 5.4M connected device connections in 2016. In terms of retail subscribers, the industry growth for the year reached 2.5% adding 7.7M subscribers. For retail subscribers, T-Mobile was the strongest performer adding 4.9M retail subscribers in 2016, followed by AT&T with 2.7M retail subscriber additions in 2016. 

​To get access to this data in-depth and quarterly, please visit our Quarterly Tracker page for more information.