Copyright Android Headlines
By all accounts, AT&T is having a decent year. According to the company’s latest financials, it managed to gain around 405,000 new postpaid customers during Q3 2025. However, that is just one part of the story. While AT&T managed to pull in quite a sizable number of new customers, it might have a retention problem. AT&T might have a problem with customers staying According to a report from The Street, it discovered in the financial report that AT&T’s churn rate increased by 14 basis points year-over-year. This means that while AT&T might be bringing in new customers each quarter, it has a problem keeping existing ones. And whose fault is this? Could it be that the marketing by Verizon and T-Mobile are too good? Turns out, it might actually be AT&T’s own doing. The carrier had recently made a decision to reduce the monthly discount for customers who opted for autopay and paperless billing. This means that customers who did opt into these programs suddenly saw their discounts gone. For some, it might have been these discounts that kept them on AT&T’s network. Now that those discounts are no more, these customers also have no reason to stick around. Also, as The Street points out, the carrier faced some controversy with billing. AT&T, like all other carriers, is trying to lure customers to their network. However, some customers discovered higher-than-expected monthly bills after the fact. AT&T insists that it’s normal While the increased churn rate is alarming, AT&T doesn’t think so. In fact, during the earnings call, AT&T Chief Financial Officer Pascal Desroches said this follows “seasonable patterns.” According to Desroches, “This reflects increased marketplace activity and, to a lesser degree, an increase in the portion of our customer base reaching the end of device financing periods, which normalized as we exited the quarter. Based on this operating environment, we continue to plan for postpaid phone churn and upgrades to follow seasonal patterns in the fourth quarter, when we typically see more switching and upgrade activity due to new device launches and the holiday season.” AT&T CEO John Stankey also notes that rival carriers have been pretty aggressive with their own luring tactics. “It’s been competitive. It continues to be competitive. There are shifts in tactics all the time that occur in this market, and we’re in a cycle right now that, because of the maturity level, tactics have shifted.”
