T-Mobile lost 186,000 contract customers

In a quarter marked by uncertainty over its merger with AT&T, T-Mobile added net subscribers in the third quarter, lost contract customers and kept churn rates steady. T-Mobile lost 186,000 contract customers—called postpaid by other carriers. If you include losses in connected device contract, T-Mobile dropped 389,000 contract customers and improvement from the 536,000 dropped in the second quarter.

On the prepaid front, T-Mobile added 312,000 customers in the third quarter. Churn was 3.5 percent in the third quarter up from 3.3 percent in the second quarter and 3.4 percent a year ago. As for its merger with AT&T, T-Mobile said that parent Deutsche Bank continues to pursue the AT&T deal and will battle the Department of Justice in court in mid-February. In the meantime, T-Mobile is becoming a value player. The company launched unlimited value plans that seem to have attracted customers. Attorney General Eric Holder poured cold water on talk of a settlement in the Justice Department's antitrust challenge to AT&T Inc.'s $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile USA, saying his lawyers are eager to fight the case in court.

Levie gave Sprint until Nov. 21 to meet AT&T’s requests. AT&T says it needs the documents to defend against the Justice Department’s antitrust suit to stop the $39 billion transaction.  Attorney General Holder has reaffirmed that his Justice Department lawyers are eager to fight the case in court. Mr. Holder said the department doesn't file a case if it isn't prepared to see it through. The Justice Department filed suit to block AT&T's deal in August, saying the proposed merger of two of the four national cellphone carriers would reduce competition and raise prices for consumers.

Of those, 11 involved supplementing information Sprint gave to the Justice Department to include data from May to the present. Three requests also seek data from May 2009 to April 2010 regarding Sprint’s wireless plan pricing and “specialized customers.” Levie also said Sprint must turn over any information given to the Federal Communications Commission regarding the T-Mobile deal that hadn’t been given to the Justice Department.
AT&T also requested Sprint’s analysis of the merger and information on Sprint’s bids for government contracts over the past three years, the identities of Sprint’s business and government customers, and the number and location of proposed cell sites that Sprint planned at some point to deploy and abandoned.
Sprint urged Levie to throw out AT&T’s subpoenas, saying its rival’s requests are “overlapping” and “burdensome.” Sprint argued that AT&T already has more than two million pages of documents from Sprint that the company had earlier given to the Justice Department.