Technologies

T-Mobile Leads US Carriers With Over 900,000 Added Phone Customers

The carrier’s positive holiday quarter continued its growth streak.

T-Mobile grew its customer base over the holiday period, finishing the year with another strong quarter that saw it bring in 927,000 postpaid phone additions over the quarter, the metric used by the industry as an indicator of success.

This capped off a year of growth for phones that resulted in 3.1 million more that signed up for monthly plans over 2022. All told, it had 6.4 million net additions over 2022, half of which had signed up for phone plans.

«We’re winning the highest share of switching decisions in the industry,» T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said on the company’s earnings call Wednesday. He didn’t say if the carrier would be changing its promotional strategy, standing in contrast with AT&T’s and Verizon’s recently declared intent to wind down their aggressive phone deals, which had been used to lure customers.

Sievert addressed the recent cybersecurity breach that affected 37 million T-Mobile customers, voicing regret that any information was exposed but noting that the carrier’s systems prevented the «most sensitive kinds» of data from being accessed. The hack was the fifth breach in five years, prompting concern over the carrier’s security.

T-Mobile continued slowly growing its 5G network and announced that it is now covering 265 million people with its faster midband and millimeter-wave «Ultra Capacity» 5G flavors, which offer significantly improved speeds and capacity compared to 4G LTE and its low-band 5G network (what T-Mobile calls «Extended Range 5G»). That marks an increase of 15 million over the last quarter, with the carrier planning to expand this faster network to 300 million people by the end of 2023.

Sievert said that of its 150 MHz of spectrum, 130 MHz is dedicated to midband 5G, which it aims to grow to 200 MHz by the end of 2023.

T-Mobile reported a more modest 25,000 prepaid net additions due to customers switching providers, though the carrier noted that it was the only one with positive gains — Verizon lost 175,000 and AT&T lost 13,000 prepaid customers over the holiday period. Sievert took this as a healthy sign for the industry as customers continued to shift from prepaid to postpaid contracts.

T-Mobile’s internet customer base grew with 524,000 net additions in the quarter, slightly lower than the 578,000 added last quarter as the carrier adjusts to increased deactivations from a customer base that grew to 2.6 million by the end of the year. Most of these are using T-Mobile’s fixed wireless running on its mobile 5G network, which Sievert acknowledged on the call has less overall bandwidth capacity than wired fiber internet but which is cheaper and available to tens of millions of households without needing to go through the trouble of laying cable, making it attractive to customers.

«Most of our [fixed wireless] customers are coming directly from cable, not just from rural areas or unconnected places or DSL,» Sievert said.

T-Mobile reported $15.5 billion in service revenue, a growth of 4% year over year, which resulted in a diluted earnings per share of $1.18, an increase of 71% from the same period in 2021. That was above the $1.10 earnings per share expected by analysts polled by Yahoo Finance.

Shares of T-Mobile rose 0.5% in early morning trading.

T-Mobile said it’s on track to meet expectations for 2023, which includes finalizing its integration with Sprint’s network by the end of the year. The carrier had «substantially completed» decommissioning of Sprint’s network in the third quarter of 2022. T-Mobile expects postpaid net customer additions of between 5 million and 5.5 million, half of which will be on phones.

The company capped off its quarterly report by committing to a sustainability goal of zero emissions across its entire carbon footprint by 2040, though it didn’t offer any specifics on how it would meet that goal.

Technologies

Claude Can Now Spin Up Spreadsheets, Reports and Slide Decks Directly in Chat

The latest feature is currently in preview for Claude Max, Team and Enterprise customers.

Anthropic is pushing Claude further beyond text-based answers. The AI chatbot can now generate and edit files, including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slide decks and PDFs, directly inside Claude.ai and its desktop app. This update will allow Claude to deliver finished, professional files instead of just copy-pasted text.

The feature is currently in preview for Claude Max, Team and Enterprise customers. Pro users will get access in the coming weeks.

Read also: Claude AI Can Now End Conversations It Deems Harmful or Abusive

What this update brings to Claude

Users can now drop in raw data and get back a spreadsheet with formulas, charts and a written summary. Meeting notes can become a polished report or slide presentation. Claude can transform data into slides or a stack of invoices into a spreadsheet. Claude can reportedly build complex assets like financial models or project trackers from scratch, too.

The new functionality is powered by a secure computing environment that lets Claude write code and run programs in the background to assemble files. Anthropic positions the update as a way to shorten the distance between ideas and deliverables. Instead of spending hours cleaning data or formatting documents, customers would use Claude to handle the execution while they focus on strategy and decision-making.

Don’t use sensitive data

There’s an important caveat. Claude connects to the internet while creating and analyzing files, so companies and employees should be cautious about feeding the AI platform sensitive data.

How to get started with Claude’s new file creation feature

Turn on «Upgraded file creation and analysis» in Settings > Features > Experimental.
Upload the files you want Claude to work with or describe your request in the chat.
Collaborate with Claude by giving instructions and refining the output step-by-step.

You can download the results from there or push them straight into Google Drive.

Read also: Claude for Chrome Extension Bakes AI Right Into the Browser

Technologies

Retro Games Fan? Atari’s $180 Gamestation Go Is Up for Preorder

The company says the console will include 200 games and lots of ways to control them.

The venerable video game company Atari is offering preorders for a new game console it previewed earlier this year: The Gamestation Go will release in October for $180 (plus $8 shipping).

On its website, Atari shows off a colorful portable device with a 7-inch screen and multiple ways to control games including trackpads, a trackball and even a numeric keypad. Atari says the console will come bundled with 200 built-in games including Pac-Man, Centipede, Asteroids and Balls of Steel. It includes Wi-Fi connectivity, USB-C ports and a battery life of about 4 to 5 hours, according to the site.

The site also touts «SmartGlow» technology that lights up the section of controller to be used, depending on the game.

This isn’t the first time Atari has packaged up its retro library of games in a way to make them accessible to new audiences. In the last few years, Atari has released throwback versions of its Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 consoles. But the Gamestation is the first Atari mobile console with those games bundled in.

The console has an HDMI port that allows it to be connected to larger screens too.

Technologies

These 18 Popular VPNs Share Parent Companies and Privacy Risks

A new study found several popular VPNs are secretly connected through shared ownership, highlighting the importance of understanding who is behind your chosen VPN.

The benefits of using a VPN service to protect your privacy are clear: Your ISP and other snoops won’t be able to spy on your online activity. What’s not always clear is which VPN service is trustworthy.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is software that creates a secure connection between your device and the internet by routing your internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a remote server. A VPN essentially masks your IP address and helps keep some of your browsing activities private. Recently, three university researchers have discovered that 18 of the most widely used VPNs on the Google Play store have shared infrastructures with serious security flaws that could expose customers’ browsing activity and leave it vulnerable to decryption. These VPNs are among the top 100 most popular on the Google Play Store, comprising more than 700 million downloads.

Read more: Best VPN Service for 2025: Our Top Picks in a Tight Race

The peer-reviewed study by the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium found that these VPNs, despite calling themselves independent businesses, are actually grouped into three separate families of companies.

None of CNET’s recommended VPNs — ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, Proton VPN and Mullvad — are on the list. (If you currently don’t have a VPN, here’s why you might want to start using one.)

According to the findings, these are the three groups that contain the 18 VPNs:

Family A: Turbo VPN, Turbo VPN Lite, VPN Monster, VPN Proxy Master, VPN Proxy Master Lite, Robot VPN, Snap VPN and SuperNet VPN
Family B: Global VPN, Inf VPN, Melon VPN, Super Z VPN, Touch VPN, VPN ProMaster, XY VPN and 3X VPN
Family C: X-VPN and Fast Potato VPN

Researchers determined that the VPNs in Family A are shared between three providers linked to Qihoo 360, a firm identified by the US Department of Defense as a Chinese military company. The VPNs in Family B use the same IP addresses from the same hosting company.

Know your VPN’s parent company

It’s a cautionary tale about why it’s important to know who’s behind the VPN you’re using, says CNET senior writer Attila Tomaschek.

«It’s also crucial to know what kinds of data the VPN provider is sharing with its parent company and affiliated entities,» Tomaschek said. «Some of these companies may even be compelled to log customer activity and share it with authorities, depending on the jurisdiction in which they operate.»

Ashwin Vamshi, Head of Research & Detection Engineering for Cyble, said many of these shady VPNs are actually profiting off customer data. «Marketed as ‘free’ and promising ‘total anonymity,’ many of these services generate revenue by collecting, logging, and selling user data,» he told CNET. «In most of these cases, the consumer data become the product revenue stream placing privacy and security at significant risk.»

Despite the warnings, Tomaschek says it’s not so easy to figure out who controls your VPN. But he says there are measures that customers can take.

«Users can do a few things to help ensure the VPN they’re using is reputable,» Tomaschek says. «Check the privacy policy — specifically for terms like ‘logging,’ ‘data sharing’ or ‘data collection.’ A Google search of the provider can help determine whether the VPN has been involved in questionable activity. Read detailed, unbiased reviews from reputable sources. Be especially wary of signing on with a free VPN, even if it’s listed as a top choice in your app store.»

Vamshi says individuals and businesses need to be wary of VPNs don’t have «independent audits, privacy and transparency policies.» He recommends instead:

Trusted, paid VPN providers that enforce strict no-logging commitments and undergo regular compliance reviews.
Zero Trust / SASE solutions that deliver secure and identity-driven access.

The PETS researchers examined the most downloaded VPNs on Android, looking for overlaps among business paperwork, web presence and codebase. After identifying code similarities, they were able to group the 18 VPNs into three groups. The study was initially spurred by VPN Pro’s own findings, «Who owns your VPN? 105 VPNs run by just 24 companies.»

CNET’s Tomaschek has advice for anyone who has been using one of these 18 VPNs.

«I’d recommend deleting it from your device immediately,» he said. «If you suspect that any sensitive personal data may have been compromised, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your credit report and look into services like dark web monitoring or identity theft protection.»