T-Mobile continued growing its customer base in the first quarter of 2024, adding 1.2 million net customers across its phone and internet businesses in the immediate wake of a pair of acquisitions, the company said during its Q1 earnings call Thursday.
The first acquisition was the long-awaited $1.35 billion deal to purchase prepaid operator Mint Mobile, which the US Federal Communications Commission approved yesterday, finalizing a process that began a year ago when T-Mobile announced it. The carrier also announced yesterday that it has entered a joint venture with investment organization EQT to spend $950 million acquiring Lumos, a fiber internet provider, to get access to its network reaching 320,000 households on the US East Coast with wired and Wi-Fi service.
Read more:Â Best Cellphone Plans of 2024
The acquisitions expand T-Mobile’s investment in two areas: prepaid phone subscriptions and wired internet, the latter of which the carrier had largely ceded to rivals Verizon and AT&T in the past. To wit, Verizon ended the first quarter with 7.2 million wired broadband subscribers, while AT&T ended the same period with over 8.5 million. To catch up, T-Mobile will invest another $500 million between 2027 and 2028 to expand the Lumos network to 3.5 million total households by the end of the latter year, the carrier said in a blog post.
During the earnings call, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert lauded the Lumos management team for its “years of experience building fiber in an efficient, cost-effective and targeted build model. We’re really excited to be able to accelerate what Lumos has already been doing to reach more and more households in the years ahead.”
This expansion came alongside more conventional growth in the categories T-Mobile has been traditionally competitive in, like mobile. The carrier added 532,000 postpaid net customers (down a slight 6,000 from the first quarter of 2023), a metric the industry uses to denote success and dependable revenue. During the…
Read the full article here
