Despite numerous reports that Apple is falling behind on supplying carriers and customers with iPhone 5s to meet demand, AT&T came out strong with its Q3 2012 numbers especially when compared to the year-ago quarter.
The carrier rose to 4.7 million iPhone activations in the third quarter of 2012. That’s up from 3.7 million in the second quarter and 2.7 million in Q3 2011. Overall, AT&T activated 6.1 million smartphones. This means the iPhone is accounting for about 77 percent of all smartphone activations on AT&T. Most of the iPhones were activated for existing customers, however, rather than customers new to the carrier.
AT&T also couldn’t help but make a comparison to its biggest competitor, Big Red. It noted that AT&T sold 1.3 million iPhone 5s in Q3, which is double that of Verizon’s 650,000 during the same quarter.
While 1.3 million iPhone 5s and 4.7 million iPhones are both great figures, I do want to note that it is a tad unfair to compare the statistics — especially the latter one — to the year-ago quarter because the iPhone 4S wasn’t released until the last quarter of 2011, whereas the iPhone 5 made it to market during Q3 2012. That might be a contributing factor to the substantial rise in sales.
AT&T now has 44.5 million smartphones on its network, most of which are iPhones.
Five weeks after AT&T made its Mobile Share plans available and almost two million customers have already been lured into signing up. After all, you won’t be able to use FaceTime over cellular data, a new feature of iOS 6, if you don’t have a Mobile Share plan.