Is AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon the largest U.S. mobile phone carrier? It may not matter - holleyseentrusels

The two biggest mobile operators in the U.S. are fiercely competitive and intimately paired in sized. And then will AT&T's recently proposed multibillion-dollar acquisition of Leap Wireless change the balance?

Market figures and interviews with analysts suggest it won't, but they also show that now's daedal mobile industry may need new shipway to delimit success.

Later last workweek, AT&T proclaimed its intention to acquire Leap, wheeler dealer of the Cricket prepaid moveable service and one of the last remaining large regional carriers in the U.S.

Additionally to gainful about $1.2 trillion for Leap's stock, AT&T will assume the company's debts of $2.8 jillio. Leap has approximately 5 zillion customers, and AT&T plans eventually to migrate them from Jump on's CDMA network to its own GSM-based technology. Eventually, they'll meet on 4G LTE, which both companies already use.

Initially glance, it looks like a deal that will extend AT&T's subscriber lead over Verizon Wireless. In a presentation on its website, AT&T says it has 107.3 million "radiocommunication customers," patc Verizon's site claims just 98.9 1000000 "retail connections." But it turns out those two figures aren't as similar as they may look. AT&T acknowledges that the right field number to equate with Verizon's total, counting just paid and prepaid subscribers, is just under 77.9 cardinal.

How to measure

In that location are many variant ways of measuring a carrier's sized, and counting up accounts, retail or not, may not live the about meaningful anymore. The figure Verizon gives is lower, but it leaves out some types of customers that could make up the departure and and so or s.

"Verizon Radio receiver is the largest receiving set carrier in the United States supported retail connections, including both paid and prepaid. Some different carriers include reseller connections and connected devices, such Eastern Samoa e-readers and machine-to-machine connections in their numbers," Verizon spokeswoman Robin Nicol said in an email subject matter.

While phones are typically joint with a particular client who regularly pays for service, other devices and uses of mobile networks can't comprise defined soh easily.

For instance, users of Amazon Kindle e-readers get access to AT&T's network without of all time paying a monthly bill because the cost of the service is improved into the hardware price. Likewise, remote sensors in vehicles and buildings colligate to a network but don't represent a big monthly payment or, possibly, any recurring revenue at all.

Calm down, those alternative connections are one possible measuring rod of a service provider's success—or failure. Verizon stopped reporting machine-to-machine and early connections after 2011 because they were falling, psychoanalyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics said.

In 2011, Verizon's adjusted results for "in large quantities and other connections" declined 77.5 percent from the former year. Beginning in the get-go quarter of 2012, those connections were not enclosed in the company's time period or annual reports.

"They stopped recording it because they failed in this segment," Entner same. At printing press time, Verizon had not responded to a question about wherefore IT stopped reporting non-retail connections.

Despite Verizon's apparent setbacks in some businesses, analysts estimate the caller would still beat AT&T if both companies put everything on the table. And Verizon will remain out front even afterward AT&A;T absorbs Leap's accounts, they said.

Including everything, Verizon would still be the biggest past 2.5 million connections after an AT&T/Leap merger, accordant to Chetan Sharma of Chetan Sharma Consulting. Entner too estimates Verizon would remain ahead.

What's good about being big?

Why does being the biggest matter? "Bragging and marketing rights," Sharma said.

Neither ship's company calls itself the largest carrier in advertising nowadays, instead promoting the size and speed of their networks. Carriers take up advertised their size in the past, Entner said. That varied with the arrival of the Obama administration, which, among unusual things, blocked AT&T from getting T-Fluid USA.

"They all stopped when the current organization distinct to chase after big carriers," Entner aforesaid. "They probably figured out, 'Oh, I don't have to put a target area on my head.'"

These days, merely adding up subscribers, accounts, connections, or any much figures into one number is an outdated way to overestimate a service supplier's effectiveness, aforementioned Phil Marshall of Tolaga Research. He cited the example of cagy utility meters.

"Suppose you provision 100,000 meters that are dribble a small number of bytes over your network. Do you bet that the same as a voice subscriber that's spending $50 a month?" Marshall said. "If you're going to bet the total of subscribers or the number of connections, they have to be tiered, because they're just so different," Marshall said.

In the U.S. and most developed markets, it's No longer a land-snap up for subscribers, because almost everyone already has a mobile call, he aforementioned. AT&T didn't get Leap chiefly for its 5 million budget-semiconscious subscribers, but for assets that will avail it material body a stronger LTE network, according to Marshall.

"Actually, it's the spectrum, the sites, and less, the subscribers," he said.

Marshall thinks the industry will change to another way of gauging the relative size up of carriers. One measure might be their overall revenue, he said. Past that measure, Verizon Wireless appears to beat AT&T once once again: For the first base quarter of this year, it according total operating revenue of $19.5 billion, compared with absolute operating revenue for AT&T's wireless segment of $16.7 billion.

One of these days other way to look at size is in terms of spectrum, the licensed frequencies over which mobile traffic flows. Away that measure, both of the mammoth carriers lose out to Dash, which is usually ranked as the third-largest operator.

Sprint only has about 55 million customers, but followers its recent acquisition of Clearwire, Sprint has an average of more or less 200MHz of spectrum licenses in the top 100 U.S. markets. Away comparison, J.P. Morgan analysts estimated in December that Verizon had an average 105MHz in those markets and AT&T had 89MHz. Leap would give AT&T another 20MHz, still far short of Dash's total.

Non all spectrum is equally blue-chip or equally good for for each one field. Merely wider spectrum bands sack carry more dealings to more subscribers. It's an asset carriers can keep using to accommodate more users or high information use, Recon's Entner said. "It allows you to be more competitive."

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/452932/is-atandt-sprint-or-verizon-the-largest-u-s-mobile-phone-carrier-it-may-not-matter.html

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