AT&T Wireless sees 36% revenue leap

Earnings also up thanks to subscribers and acquisitions

AT&T Wireless has announced a 36.5 per cent jump in revenue to $3.38 billion. The wireless arm of the telco giant, recently floated off, also saw earnings before interest, tax etc leap 50.4 per cent in Q2 to $765 million.

It's all thanks to more subscribers and recent acquisitions. Average revenue per user has gone up by just 2.6 per cent but the fact that there's 670,000 more of them (to make 16.4 million) has certainly helped matters. Pull out the acquisitions, and revenues rose 20.3 per cent.

The company reckons it will put on an extra 700,000 subscribers next quarter and even more the quarter after that.

CEO of the company's mobility business Mohan Gyani used the figures to hype up its recently announced 2.5G service. "Last week, AT&T Wireless began offering Seattle businesses the next generation of wireless services, making us the first wireless carrier in the United States to introduce advanced wireless data services," he said. "Soon, millions of our customers will have an exciting first taste of new mobile multimedia services."

The only problem remains that the service is sketchy at best and rather expensive but we'll ignore that for now. The chairman and CEO John D. Zeglis also got a bit carried away with hippy philosophy (albeit in management speak): "Ultimately, we envision a world where our customers are liberated and their lives enriched by untethered access to all the world’s people and all the world’s information, no matter where they are on earth." Ain't that a beautiful vision?

Whether the company can make itself big enough before it is bought out by a bigger fish is still to be seen.

Also, even though it has formally separated from Ma Bell, it seems to be having an identity crisis. Links regarding the company still point to www.att.com/wireless, but its main site is now www.attwireless.com. That won't stop you having to go to www.attws.com though. ®

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