Connected Cars Drive AT&T Wireless Adds in Q3

AT&T added 2.5 million net new wireless connections in Q3, the company said in a news release Thursday. That included 289,000 postpaid and 466,000 prepaid net adds, the highest number of prepaid adds in eight years, AT&T said. But the biggest growth came through device additions -- 1.6 million in the quarter, including 1 million connected cars. Total wireless churn was 1.33 percent. Other business lines grew at more modest rates -- 26,000 domestic net adds for DirecTV and 192,000 IP broadband net adds. Consolidated revenue was up 19 percent over the year-earlier quarter, driven by DirecTV revenue, at $39.1 billion. Adjusted net income came in at $3 billion, versus $3.1 billion in the same quarter last year. AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said on a call with analysts he sees the net add of prepaid customers, after losing them in the same quarter last year, as the “big story” of the quarter. “This has been a remarkable turn around story for us,” he said. Stephens also emphasized AT&T’s progress in Mexico, where the company recently bought Nextel’s wireless properties and carrier Iusacell. By the end of the year, AT&T expects to cover 40 million POPs with 4G LTE, he said. AT&T is still integrating the two networks, Stephens said. “This is the heavy lifting of the wireless business, but we have done it before and we are confident we can do it again successfully,” he said. “We are also confident that we will grow market share.”