AT&T has set another record: It sold 3.2 million iPhones during the quarter, but the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) exclusivity that it has enjoyed for three years is no longer contributing as heavily to the company’s top-line subscriber growth. Of the 3.2 million iPhones activated, only 27 percent, or 864,000, were new customers to AT&T (NYSE: T).
Still, those made up more than half of the company’s overall net adds. It added 1.6 million net new subscribers during the second quarter for a total of 90.1 million. Other contributors included connected devices such as e-readers, GPS devices and alarm monitoring systems. In fact, the carrier said it added 400,000 to 500,000 iPad 3G customers during the quarter. Overall, the company earned 68 cents a share on revenues of $30.8 billion, and updated its outlook to expect strong earnings per share growth for full year.
The year-over-year increase in revenues were driven by smartphone adoption and data services, despite AT&T’s cheaper data plans that went into affect during the quarter. AT&T’s CFO Rick Lindner said it’s too early to say how its new tiered data plans are going to shake out, but early results “are pretty encouraging, and pretty much what we expected.” He said fewer people have migrated for the $30 unlimited plans to the $25-two gigabyte plan than they expected. At the same time, he said they’ve seen a nice influx of new customers who are paying for the lower-end data rates. “I think we are seeing the benefits of lowering the point of entry so that customers can move into integrated devices, and try data services, and then based on the amount of data they use, they

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