AT&T Activates Record-breaking 8.6M iPhones in Fourth Quarter 2012

[Anthony Bouchard]

AT&T has announced Thursday afternoon on their press page that in quarter four of 2012 the company has sold 10.2 million smartphones. This is the highest amount of smartphones ever sold by any U.S. carrier to date. The company also announces that it activated a record-breaking 8.6 million iPhone handsets in quarter four of 2012, 16% of which were new customers.

AT&T’s iPhone 5 might have won some popularity over the iPhone 5 on some other major U.S. carriers because of the advantage of being able to drop down to 4G HSPA+ when 4G LTE is not in range. AT&T's 4G HSPA+ offers maximum downlink speeds of 14.4Mb/s while on many competing carriers’ 3G networks, which the iPhone 5 will drop down to when 4G LTE is not in range, only offer a maximum downlink speed of 7.2Mb/s.

In addition to data speed advantages, AT&T announced in November that it would begin to cut the tape on FaceTime over cellular for some users at no extra cost. AT&T later announced in January that they would enable the feature for everyone that had a tiered data plan and an iOS device running iOS 6, however unlimited data users still remain without the feature unless they use a jailbreak tweak to enable it.

AT&T continues to roll out ultra-fast 4G LTE access across the United States, expanding its reach to AT&T smartphone customers. 4G LTE is also an important factor in many customers' choice of carrier when looking for the right smartphone and service.

AT&T also touts a customer base of 47.1 million in the press release, which is a number 2.5 million customers stronger than in quarter three of 2012, illustrating that AT&T's popularity is slowly but surely growing in the U.S.

Sources: AT&T via MacRumors

[Villebilly]

So if 85% of their smartphones were iPhones, how many of Samsung's did they activate?

[RoloDiva13]

So if 85% of their smartphones were iPhones, how many of Samsung's did they activate?

LOL apparently, not enough to warrant a mention in their press release