T-Mobile feels pain amid Sprint, Verizon, AT&T customer gains

T-Mobile on Friday said it lost 318,000 contract customers in the fourth quarter, a dismal performance relative to rivals Sprint, Verizon Wireless and AT&T.

In the fourth quarter, T-Mobile said it lost 23,000 net customers. In the third quarter, T-Mobile added 137,000 net customers and 371,000 in the fourth quarter a year ago.

Clearly, the gains of other carriers mean pain for T-Mobile.

To wit:

• Sprint added 1.1 million wireless subscribers (58,000 of them postpaid).
• AT&T added 400,000 retail postpaid customers and another 442,000 including tablets.
• Verizon added 872,000 retail postpaid customers, but that includes iPad activations.

"High contract churn and significant contract customer losses in the fourth quarter of 2010 indicate that we still have a fair amount of work ahead of us and that any turnaround will take time," said Philipp Humm, CEO of T-Mobile USA in a statement.

T-Mobile's total churn was 3.6 percent in the fourth quarter, up from 3.4 percent in the third quarter and 3.3 percent in the fourth quarter a year ago. Contract churn was 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter.

The company reported fourth quarter net income of $268 million on revenue of $5.36 billion.