NEW YORK (USA Today) — The already heated competition between T-Mobile CEO John Legere and Sprint’s chief Marcelo Claure could soon reach stratospheric heights.
Research firm GSMA Intelligence, which tracks the mobile industry, is predicting that T-Mobile may have finally surpassed Sprint in the three-month period ended in June to become the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier.
The final tally won’t be known until Sprint reports earnings on Aug. 4.
But if GSMA is right, the companies —which have been locked in a very public battle for customers that has sometimes spilled over into the Twittersphere — will soon report data showing that T-Mobile has surpassed Sprint in terms of total “connections” (an industry metric for tallying customers) for the first time since at least 2000, when GSMA began tracking the data.