On the heels of Verizon and AT&T reporting third quarter numbers, the ball is passed to Sprint.

Unfortunately, the quarter was a tough one for the nation's third largest wireless carrier, despite reporting the best net retail subscriber results in just over two years thanks to growth in the post-paid brand.  Sprint reported a loss of $478 million, or 17 cents a share - slightly beyond analyst predictions of 15 cents a share, and higher than the $326 million reported in the same quarter last year.

Sprint lost 135,000 net retail customers in the third quarter and net wireless customers dropped by 545,000 (total net losses were 801,000 customers - 271,000 on CDMA and 530,000 on iDEN), bringing the total subscriber count to 48.3 million.  Third quarter churn was 2.17 percent, an increase from 2.05 percent in the prior quarter and 2.15 percent in the third quarter of 2008.  Post-paid ARPU (average revenue per user) has stayed steady at $56 for the past seven quarters, primarily due to the fixed nature of Sprint's Everything plans.  Data revenue was at $16.25, while CDMA data revenue (excluding iDEN) increased to over $19.

Thanks to landing several hit devices, the introduction of Any Mobile, Anytime, and Sprint's Everything plans, it's thought that the company's numbers will improve as time goes on.

Source: Sprint