T-Mobile Leapfrogs Sprint To Become Third Largest US Wireless Carrier

T-Mobile CEO John Legere has been promising that this day would come for about a year now. But now that Sprint has released its latest earnings report, which details its total number of wireless subscribers, Legere can finally pop open the champagne and celebrate capturing… a distant third place behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T.

Sprint revealed for its first fiscal quarter of 2015 that it ended with 56.8 million total subscribers. T-Mobile, on the other hand, ended its Q2 2015 with 58.9 million subscribers. It’s a difference of roughly 2 million subscribers, but that’s good enough for bragging rights.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere

John Legere’s Twitter account was eerily silent this morning, which was quite the surprise given how frequently he uses the social media outlet to curse or chastise his competitors. However, once Legere got his bearings, he fired off the following, respectable tweet:

Now that it’s official, how about we focus on why @TMobile is succeeding? Hint: Listening to customers!! http://t.co/VVq7ut5hFB

— John Legere (@JohnLegere) August 4, 2015

That’s not quite the fiery Legere that we all know and love (or hate depending on your feeling on his ever-present rage), so maybe he hasn’t had his first cup of coffee yet this morning.

Despite being relegated to last place in the U.S. wireless carrier market, Sprint is optimistic about its future given that it had 675,000 customer additions during the quarter. “Over the past year, Sprint has made meaningful progress in our turnaround by improving our network performance and enhancing our overall value proposition,” said Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure. “Going forward, we are confident in our plan to leverage our unique spectrum assets to make our network a competitive advantage, aggressively reduce operating costs, and utilize our business relationships and assets to fund our turnaround.”

Sprint is hoping that promotions like its Family Share Pack will persuade more people to flock to its network. The Family Share Pack allows a family of four to share 10GB of data for $100 a month or 40GB of data for $120 per month. Unfortunately for folks that have been loyal to Sprint, this latest promotion is only available to new customers that have switched from a competing wireless carrier.