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AT&T announces 75 percent of postpaid users on smartphones, earnings of $3.8 billion for Q3 2013

AT&T announces 75 percent of postpaid users on smartphones, earnings of $3.8 billion for Q3 2013

By Jacob Kastrenakes, a deputy editor who oversees tech and news coverage. Since joining The Verge in 2012, he’s published 5,000+ stories and is the founding editor of the creators desk.

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In its Q3 2013 earnings, AT&T announced that smartphones have continued to take over its postpaid network in a major way. Three quarters of its postpaid customers are now using smartphones — up from just 66 percent this quarter last year — and the company expects that this number will continue to grow. The carrier also sold more smartphones than ever before, selling 600,000 more year-over-year, with 89 percent of postpaid device sales being smartphones.

Profit and revenue are upAT&T's profits and revenues are also up a small amount year-over-year. It earned $3.8 billion in profit — up from $3.6 billion — and saw $32.2 billion in revenue, an increase of 2.2 percent. It also a net increase of 989,000 new wireless subscribers, a big jump up from 678,000 this quarter last year. AT&T also touted just how well the adoption of LTE has been going in its earnings. It now has 42 percent of its postpaid smartphone users with an LTE-capable device, while 70 percent have a "4G-capable" device that supports either LTE or HSPA+.

When asked about T-Mobile's newly announced plan to give tablet users 200MB of free data, AT&T CFO John Stephens dismissed concerns that it might be cutting into his business. "There continues to be a lot of noise about what's going on," Stephens says. "You have to realize that our [subscriber loss] was down year-over-year ... That's the real measure." Though AT&T has been reactive to T-Mobile's tactics, it seems that it hasn't been having a serious effect yet.

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