Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- T-Mobile led US postpaid net additions in 2024 with a staggering gain of over three million subscribers.
- Verizon trailed significantly at the bottom with only 82,000 net adds, while AT&T added more than half a million subscribers.
The US market is dominated by the trio of Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T. Sure, there are smaller carriers and MVNOs, but more often than not, users are likely going to be sticking to these top three despite constantly rising prices, frequent data breaches, and often deceptive business practices. But which of the three is increasingly popular amongst subscribers? The answer is, surprisingly and unsurprisingly, T-Mobile.
Companies are releasing their results for the last financial year, giving us a chance to peek into their businesses to see how well they are (or aren’t) doing. One of the metrics these carriers release is “postpaid phone net adds,” which denotes the net new postpaid phone subscribers a company has added to its network over time by subtracting the number of disconnections from its new subscribers in the postpaid segment.
While this number doesn’t indicate the telco’s overall financial health, it gives us a good gauge for overall user sentiment, showing where more smartphone users are migrating. Services like prepaid and broadband aren’t included here, so keep that in mind.
This is how the three carriers stacked for postpaid phone net adds in 2024, as taken from their respective year-end financial reports:
- T-Mobile: 3,100,000
- AT&T: 1,653,000
- Verizon: 82,000
T-Mobile’s pole position is both a surprise and not one. We frequently hear of T-Mobile’s data breaches, and its backtracking of its Price Lock Guarantee is also infamous. At the same time, a recent report from Ookla Speedtest mentions that T-Mobile is both the fastest mobile network and the most consistent in the US. Verizon and AT&T Verizon come second and third for speed, but their positions are flipped when it comes to consistency.
Verizon’s placement at the bottom is surprising, as it often ranks better than AT&T. In fact, Ookla assigned AT&T the lowest rating for consumer sentiment. AT&T also placed last in almost every performance metric measured by Ookla, except for 5G consistency, but it gained more subscribers than Verizon by a considerable margin.
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