VZW outpaces AT&T in all metrics except the big one

Anything you can do I can do better—that seems to be the message Verizon Wireless delivered to AT&T today. AT&T reported 1.3 million new subs. VZW recorded 1.5 million. AT&T posts a company-low monthly postpaid churn of 1.1%. VZW drops its churn rate 0.83%. AT&T mobile data revenues came in at $2.5 billion. Verizon beat them by $100 million.

As for the one big metric though, AT&T still reigns supreme. AT&T has 73 million subscribers to Verizon’s 64 million. That soon, too, could change as Verizon pursues a few inorganic growth opportunities. If it succeeds in acquiring Rural Cellular and Alltel, VZW’s subscriber base would surpass 80 million. Even without those acquisitions though, Verizon is showing signs of outpacing AT&T in one key category: quality of subscriber.

Of Verizon’s 1.5 million net additions, 97.5% of them are retail postpaid additions. Meanwhile, of AT&T’s 1.3 million net adds, 67.1% were postpaid subscribers. What that means is that while almost all of VZW’s customers are on higher-paying monthly contracts, a growing number of AT&T’s customers are on lower-paying prepaid plans, which will eventually drop its overall revenue per customer as well as limit the number of customers to which it can sell wireless data plans, its future revenue source.

AT&T still has a few tricks up its sleeve though. Verizon may have exceeded AT&T in total mobile data revenues, but AT&T is growing its data services faster. AT&T saw a 52% increase in data revenues versus 45.6% for Verizon, a trend over the last few quarters. AT&T owes a lot of that data growth to the iPhone and the accompanying data plans required for a contract. That trend will likely increase this quarter due to the launch of the iPhone 3G, which will not only bring a bevy of new customer additions, but a bump in data revenue.