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T-Mobile officially passes Sprint to become third-largest US carrier

T-Mobile officially passes Sprint to become third-largest US carrier

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Sprint drops to last place among the major US carriers

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It's a good day to be John Legere. Sprint's latest earnings report has revealed that the company has officially fallen behind T-Mobile US in total subscriber count and now sits last among major US carriers. The latest figures show Sprint with a total of 57 million customers and T-Mobile with 58.9 million. Whereas T-Mobile experienced another surging quarter that brought in 2 million new customers, Sprint added only 675,000. Earlier this year, Legere claimed that T-Mobile had already surpassed Sprint, but now the numbers back up the switch no matter how you look at them.

The drop to fourth place is undoubtedly embarrassing for Sprint (and likely to produce plenty of John Legere smack talk), but Sprint's performance this quarter was actually somewhat encouraging. It's managed to — for now — stem the bleeding of smartphone customers who've fled for rival carriers in recent years; Sprint lost only 12,000 postpaid subscribers versus the 620,000 that bailed in this quarter last year.

The company is also pointing to a record low churn rate of 1.56 percent as another good sign and evidence that its new David Beckham-led advertising campaign and attractive rate plans may be turning things around. As noted by Recode, Sprint has hired a new CFO and COO to serve under CEO Marcelo Claure, who was installed as chief executive after Softbank's purchase of the company.

"Over the past year, Sprint has made meaningful progress in our turnaround by improving our network performance and enhancing our overall value proposition," Claure said in a statement today. He and T-Mobile CEO Legere frequently exchange barbs on Twitter, with a prime example occurring earlier this month when Claure slammed T-Mobile's Uncarrier movement as "bullshit." Despite Sprint's progress in holding onto customers, today's numbers will be seen as a big win for that Uncarrier effort — even if Claure insists a turnaround is happening.