During the earnings call for the final quarter of 2014, John Legere announced that – unofficially – T-Mobile was already ahead of Sprint in total subscriptions. But the official numbers didn’t agree. After T-Mo’s blockbuster quarter, many had assumed that those official numbers would catch up. With the Verizon and AT&T posting disappointing subscriber add numbers, the industry was all but certain that Sprint wouldn’t do much better.

Sadly – thanks to strong prepaid performance – Sprint’s customer base grew. It’s still ahead of T-Mobile. But only by a very small margin.

Sprint, like Verizon and AT&T, posted relatively poor postpaid phone users. It lost 201,000 postpaid phone customers, but gained a total of 211,000 postpaid customers of all kinds. It also added 546,000 prepaid net adds and wholesale net adds of 492,000. In all, the company gained 1.2 million new customers. This means that now – officially – Sprint has a customer base of 57.1 million customers.

If you remember, T-Mobile added a total of 1.8 million net adds bringing it up to 56.8 million total subscribers. As anyone with any basic math skills could tell you, the carrier is still 300,000 customers short of taking 3rd place from its nearest rival. Now, if you believe T-Mo’s rhetoric that Sprint is including customers that have been inactive for up to 6 months, our favorite carrier has been ahead of Ol’ Yeller for months now. But we can only go based on the official, reported numbers. These state that T-Mo still isn’t the 3rd biggest carrier in the U.S. But it won’t be long now…

Source: Sprint