Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
T-Mobile claims that it now has more customers than AT&T — at least, depending on how you count them. In its second quarter earnings report, T-Mobile announced that it now has 98.3 million total customers, saying that it has overtaken AT&T “in total branded customers across both postpaid and prepaid.” The surge in subscribers is due to T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint, as this is the first time that T-Mobile is counting Sprint subscribers following their blockbuster merger.
But looking a bit more closely at the numbers, T-Mobile may not be making an apples-to-apples comparison. T-Mobile uses the term “total customers” to describe its scale, and it’s comparing those to AT&T’s postpaid and prepaid “subscribers and connections,” as reported…