The last of the major wireless carriers released their first quarter results yesterday. We can now see what happened with wireless industry growth last quarter.
Bell has finally started to turn things around in its wireless division, but it still lags significantly behind its competitors. Bell added around 28,000 postpaid subscribers, compared to 97,000 at Rogers and 72,400 at TELUS, for a total of about 200,000 new postpaid subscribers. Contrast this with only 165,000 subscribers added a year ago. Last year, Bell had an abysmal first quarter with only 10,000 net postpaid additions.
Some of the media reports show TELUS having the most wireless additions this quarter, which is true if you include prepaid subscribers. Rogers had a net loss of 29,000 prepaid subscribers, pulling down their total net activations. But that was a good thing.
Why?
Because Rogers significantly raised its prepaid ARPU over the past year, so they seem to have shed the lower value subscribers to other service providers while increasing their total prepaid revenue.
The other numbers to watch in these quarterly reports are postpaid ARPU and postpaid churn, again led by Rogers with better than $72 and 1.1% respectively. Data is now more than 15% of Rogers’ revenue. TELUS also experienced a 50% increase in its wireless data revenues and its data represents about the same percentage of its wireless revenues.
MTS Allstream reports later today, providing some visibility into the performance of one of the most promising potential new national wireless players.