Orange County Register

Whoa! Irvine’s little ol’ prepaid wireless carrier isn’t so little anymore. So far this year, Boost Mobile has added 2.1 million net new customers. That helped limit parent company Sprint Nextel to just a 135,000 net loss of retail subscribers during the July to September quarter (ouch).

Another ouch – Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse considered the quarter the company’s “best net retail subscriber results in more than two years,” according to the press release. Sprint now has 48.3 million customers, down from 48.8 million in the second quarter and down from 49.1 million in the first quarter.

Boost is obviously a bright spot. Boost Mobile said it grew 14.4 percent this year over last year. It credits the $50 monthly unlimited plan, which Boost introduced in January. It also got another boost from adding new retailers like Sam’s Club and Car Toys.

Also from today’s earnings release, which categorizes all of Sprint’s prepaid services under one line item:

• Sprint now has 5.7 million prepaid subscribers (5.2 million on iDEN and 500,000 on CDMA)
• Churn rate, or the percent of customers coming and going, was down to 6.65 percent during the quarter for prepaid customers, compared to 8.16 percent a year ago and 6.38 percent in the second quarter of 2009. The improvement was attributed to the new unlimited plan.
• Sprint is making more money off each prepaid customer than before. Prepaid average customer revenues during the quarter was $35 compared to $31 in the year-ago period and $34 in the second quarter of 2009.

Rival MetroPCS plans to release its results next Thursday.

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