T-Mobile US added a net total of 1.1 million customers in the second quarter, including 678,000 for its T-Mobile and MetroPCS brands — the strongest growth in four years for the newly reshaped company.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere
T-Mobile CEO John Legere

That didn’t include 8.9 million customers acquired by the company through its combination with MetroPCS. All told, T-Mobile’s customer base rose to 44 million — up from from 34 million in the first quarter of this year.

Bellevue-based T-Mobile is still the fourth-largest wireless carrier in the country, well behind AT&T and Verizon, but it’s getting closer to Sprint, with its 53 million customers.

The increase follows a series of big changes in the way T-Mobile sells phones and wireless plans. T-Mobile stopped offering traditional phone subsidies to consumers but also unbundled the cost of the phone from the wireless plan — lowering the cost of the wireless service and reducing the overall bill after the phone is paid in full. The company also introduced a $10/month subscription program called JUMP that lets customers upgrade to new phones more frequently without penalty.

“T-Mobile’s Un-carrier approach has clearly resonated with consumers,” said T-Mobile CEO John Legere in the company’s earnings release. “By fixing the things that drive them mad, like contracts and upgrades, and freeing them from the two-year sentences imposed on them by our competitors, they are choosing the new T-Mobile in unprecedented numbers.”

He added, “We are just beginning and we will continue to apply this innovative thinking to the Un-carrier offers we create and to the internal operations of our company, which taken together are driving significant shareholder value creation.”

The company posted a net loss of $16 million for the second quarter, compared with a profit of $207 million in the same quarter a year ago. Total revenues were $6.2 billion, up from $4.8 billion a year ago.

One reason for the loss: The company needed to advertise heavily to get those new customers. T-Mobile’s financial statements show overall customer acquisition costs of $1 billion for the quarter, up 37 percent, due in part to advertising and increased commission costs.

More significant is the cost of phones. The company’s overall cost of equipment sales, including phone hardware, jumped to $1.9 billion, from $886 million a year ago. T-Mobile attributed the increase to a higher average cost for phones, and higher sales volumes driven by the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S4.

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