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

Tesla Has a New Range of Affordable Electric Cars: How Much They Cost

The new, stripped-back versions of the Model Y and Model 3 have a more affordable starting price.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Oct. 22 #598

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Oct. 22, No. 598.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a fun one — I definitely have at least two of these in my house. Some of the answers are a bit tough to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Catch all.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: A mess of items.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

BATE, LICE, SLUM, CAPE, HOLE, CARE, BARE, THEN, SLAM, SAMBA, BACK

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

TAPE, COIN, PENCIL, BATTERY, SHOELACE, THUMBTACK

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is JUNKDRAWER. To find it, look for the J that’s five letters down on the far-left row, and wind down, over and then up.

Quick tips for Strands

#1: To get more clue words, see if you can tweak the words you’ve already found, by adding an «S» or other variants. And if you find a word like WILL, see if other letters are close enough to help you make SILL, or BILL.

#2: Once you get one theme word, look at the puzzle to see if you can spot other related words.

#3: If you’ve been given the letters for a theme word, but can’t figure it out, guess three more clue words, and the puzzle will light up each letter in order, revealing the word.

Technologies

Today’s Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for Oct. 22, #1586

Here are hints and the answer for today’s Wordle for Oct. 22, No. 1,586.

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Wordle puzzle features some letters I don’t often guess, but it’s not terribly difficult. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.

Today’s Wordle hints

Before we show you today’s Wordle answer, we’ll give you some hints. If you don’t want a spoiler, look away now.

Wordle hint No. 1: Repeats

Today’s Wordle answer has one repeated letter.

Wordle hint No. 2: Vowels

Today’s Wordle answer has one vowel.

Wordle hint No. 3: First letter

Today’s Wordle answer begins with S.

Wordle hint No. 4: Last letter

Today’s Wordle answer ends with T.

Wordle hint No. 5: Meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can refer to an action displaying spectacular skill and daring.

TODAY’S WORDLE ANSWER

Today’s Wordle answer is STUNT.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer

Yesterday’s Wordle answer, Oct. 21, No. 1,585 was DETOX.

Recent Wordle answers

Oct. 17, No. 1,581: GROSS
Oct. 18, No. 1,582: HAVEN
Oct. 19, No. 1,583: IDEAL
Oct. 20, No. 1,584: LIMBO

Quick tips for Wordle

#1: Check our list ranking the popularity of all the letters in the alphabet and choose your starter words accordingly. (TRAIN, STERN and AUDIO are good.)

#2: Don’t forget that letters can be used more than once.

#3: Many words are similar. You don’t want to use up multiple guesses that don’t advance your cause. So if the puzzle is STA_E, don’t guess STARE, STATE and STALE. Guess something that uses that R, T and L, like TWIRL.