AT&T Profit Up 30 Percent in Second Quarter

By Gary Kim

Contributing Editor

 

AT&T’s (News - Alert) second quarter profit jumped 30 percent, powered by the addition of 1.3 million new wireless customers. As expected, landline losses accelerated: Legacy phone lines shrank 8.1 percent to 58.9 million total lines from 64.8 million.

 

Still, those results were expected. The key is broadband services and revenue. AT&T added 46,000 new broadband customer additions on the quarter, off the pace of prior years. Analysts expected a drop in new broadband additions, given market saturation and the suffering housing market. But most analysts still expected net additions to be somewhere around the 300,000 mark.

 

AT&T added 170,000 U-Verse TV customers, and now serve 549,000 U-Verse customers total. That suggests AT&T is ahead of deployment projections for the year.

 

Regional consumer revenue connections (retail voice, high speed Internet and video) totaled 48.4 million at the end of the quarter, versus 49.5 million at the end of the second quarter of 2007 and 49.3 million at the end of the first quarter of 2008.

 

Total consumer broadband and TV connections over the past year increased by 2.2 million. At the end of the second quarter, AT&T had 14.7 million total broadband connections, up 1.4 million over the past year and up 46,000 in the second quarter of 2008.

 

As the broadband access market saturates, wireline growth expectations increasingly will rest on TV services.