T-Mobile passes 25M sub mark

T-Mobile today announced it passed the 25 million subscriber mark in the fourth quarter, adding 901,000 net customers to nationwide GSM network and citing new calling plans like its myFaves program as driving sales.

T-Mobile now has 25.04 million customers, an increase of 15% over 2005. The carrier, however, is still less than half as small as the market leader Cingular Wireless, which reported 61 million subscribers last week. And while T-Mobile is growing its base at a rapid clip, it is still being far outpaced by the competition. Cingular added 2.4 million subscribers last quarter while Verizon Wireless added 2.3 million.

That trend is reflected in T-Mobile’s own postpaid churn numbers of 2.1%, which, while its best churn rate all year, is far higher than Verizon Wireless’ 0.9% postpaid churn and Cingular’s 1.5% postpaid churn last quarter.

T-Mobile USA, as a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, does not report separate earnings from its parent company.