AT&T Saw Incredible $6.7 Billion Loss In Fourth Quarter

AT&T, one of the largest wireless carriers in the United States, saw an incredible loss of $6.7 Billion in the fourth quarter. Their fail to acquire T-Mobile which resulted in a substantial fee and pension costs, are the biggest contributors to the loss.

The company recently raised data plan prices which, overall, have been received fairly well. While increasing prices, they did however give customers more data which is a good thing. Otherwise, it could have been a different story. Then again, when you’re locked down for two years and face some pretty hefty fees if you break the contract, there’s not a whole lot one can do about it.

Although the carrier lost a substantial amount of money in the fourth quarter, they sold a lot of smartphones, in fact, a record number. Sales of smartphones were up 60% compared to the previous year at just over 9 Million (9.4 Million to be exact) sold. That’s a lot of contracts.

Via Informationweek:

“With 9.4 million smartphones sold, AT&T says 56.8% of its 69.3 million postpaid subscribers have smartphones, up from 42.7% a year earlier and 32.8% two years ago. (Verizon’s smartphone penetration is 44.5% of its post-paid customers.) Smartphones represented more than 80% of postpaid device sales for the quarter.”

“Of the 9.4 million smartphones sold, 7.6 million were iPhones–the majority of which were the iPhone 4S. AT&T also said that it sold twice as many Android smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011 as it did in the year-ago quarter. AT&T didn’t provide a breakdown on exactly how many Android, Windows Phone 7, nor BlackBerry smartphones it sold, but the total of all three is 1.7 million.”

What’s your opinion of AT&T and their service?