AT&T set to smash its own smartphone record

AT&T's pursuit of new spectrum may be in trouble (CP: FCC response bashed AT&T, gives T-Mobile unexpected pat on the back), but its smartphones are selling remarkably well, John Stephens, AT&T senior executive vice president and chief financial officer, announced today at a conference in New York.

So well, in fact, that the carrier is on track to break its single-quarter record for smartphone sales.

AT&T sold approximately 6 million smartphones in the first two months of the fourth quarter — and with December sales traditionally amongst its strongest, AT&T is expecting to smash through its previous single-quarter record of 6.1 million smartphones.

Helping the nation's second-largest carrier, as it has for years, is the Apple iPhone. In the first five days of the iPhone 4S' launch, AT&T says it activated more than 1 million of them, and that sales of the device "remain strong."

Some questioned whether AT&T would see a defection in customers once Verizon, and later Sprint, secured contracts with Apple, but according to AT&T, churn levels haven't budged. And with the iPhone 4S in particular, AT&T has had the technological (and marketing) advantage of delivering faster speeds than the same phone on competing networks (Unfiltered: iPhone 4S faster on AT&T, but better voice quality on Sprint, says report).

Later this month, AT&T subscribers in New York City and a handful of other markets should see speeds increase further, when AT&T officially flips the switch on new LTE coverage, expected to reach an additional 70 million people by year's end.