Sprint's Latest Earnings Report Shows Just How Badly It Needs T-Mobile

Sprint's (NYSE: S) falling further behind the competition as its merger with T-Mobile (NASDAQ: TMUS) remains held up in court.

The fourth-place wireless carrier lost 115,000 postpaid phone subscribers during its third quarter. While that's better than analysts were expecting, it's considerably worse than the 26,000 subscribers it lost during the same period last year and the 91,000 subscribers it lost in the prior quarter.

Notably, Sprint's postpaid phone subscriber churn rate (the percentage of customers leaving the service) climbed to 2.06% last quarter. That's the highest number the company's reported since it started releasing the metric in 2015. And while T-Mobile also noted slightly higher churn last quarter, its customers left at a rate of just 1.01%.

Source Fool.com