Additionally, it said it is partnering with four software providers to gain access to 50,000 small- to medium-sized merchants.

Meanwhile, tomorrow will be exactly a year since Google launched its mobile wallet.

So, you ask, which large technology company is winning the race to gain the hearts and wallets of consumers and retailers?

Pretty clearly, it’s neither.

Google may have gotten off the blocks first, but ever since, it has been plagued by execution issues and management departures. In contrast, PayPal has a lot of institutional advantages, but it still has a long way to go before it is synonymous with Visa or MasterCard.

Here’s just a snapshot of the two companies’ advantages and disadvantages:

Google:

Pros: It has relationships with 25 national retailers, totaling 140,000 locations.

Cons: It bet too early on using near field communication technology. Sprint, the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier, is the only provider so far that is backing it and it’s deployed on only six Android devices.

PayPal:

Pros: There are 110 million people using PayPal worldwide, who are on track to spend a record $7 billion in mobile payments this year using PayPal on the phone.

Cons: The company is expecting to deploy with 20 retailers by year’s end, but based on the 16 retailers announced yesterday, I calculated that it has access to about 16,000 U.S. locations (far fewer than Google Wallet). That does not include the thousands of locations that those 50,000 small- to medium-sized retailers would contribute if they signed up for it.

Clearly, it is still early days.

And when you look at the broader market opportunity, the race is not just between Google and PayPal. All of the incumbents, including American Express, MasterCard and Visa, have announced digital wallet strategies. And then there are the start-ups, such as Square, which is seeking a $4 billion valuation in its next funding round.

There are two points to be made on the debate between PayPal vs. Google Wallet that can’t be stressed enough: PayPal has the user base, and it has the technology with the lowest barriers to entry.

In theory, if a consumer has signed up for the service from their PayPal account, they will be able to conduct a transaction using their mobile phone number and PIN – without changing carriers or phones. Likewise, merchants won’t have to upgrade their point-of-sale hardware.

In an interview, PayPal President David Marcus acknowledged there’s a chicken and egg problem: Without a lot of locations, there won’t be a lot of consumers using it. But this year is about learning and testing, he said, and next year, “it will be about iterating and full-on execution.”

If you asked the folks at Google, I’m sure they would agree. A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story, but already, there are signs that Google has learned a lot and has started to pivot.

Rick Oglesby, a senior analyst with Aite Group, believes that Google is distancing itself from NFC and from being the merchant of record.

“I think they will follow the path of least resistance, because for them, it’s not about payments — it’s about advertising,” he said. “It’s about pay-for-performance marketing. Just like how they get paid for a click-through on the Web, they want to get paid when you walk through the door — but no one is monitoring that.”

Last month, Google purchased TxVia, a little-known payments technology company, another sign that it’s changing directions.

Tony Felice, a senior strategist for Red Door Interactive who has worked with TxVia in the past, said TxVia and Google Wallet together can be very powerful. He said TxVia has all the banking relationships, which will help enable payments, gift cards and other services, and also has the ability to produce analytics about what consumers are doing and spending money on.

“Together, they will be able to get a 360-degree picture from the moment of truth to purchase,” he said. “In order to do that, you have to pull in disparate sources and synthesize it in a single place. The transactional data from TxVia is just one piece of a puzzle.”

Oglesby said despite Google’s hiccups, it’s not yet out of the race.

“It’s been a slow-growing situation, and there’s been big turnover on the executive team, but they are reassessing the situation and have made an acquisition,” he said. “I wouldn’t say they’ve screwed up because no one has run way ahead of them. They were leading the market, and tried an approach, and now there’s other approaches for them to try.”

There’s no word just yet on when the phone will show up in retail stores.

“Sprint expects to begin shipping HTC EVO 4G LTE for arrival on or around Thursday, May 24, to customers who pre-ordered the device online from Sprint,” Sprint said in a statement. “We will provide details on the full national launch as soon as possible.”

Shipments of that product — and of AT&T’s HTC One X — have been held up by an exclusion order obtained by Apple against HTC. The order means that all HTC shipments have to be inspected by U.S. Customs before entering the country.

HTC said on Sunday that the products are starting to make their way through U.S. Customs.

Mardini, a 22-year-old entrepreneur and New York University student, is reselling devices and services from Sprint. In fact, Sprint is handling most facets of the business, aside from sales and marketing.

That’s a good thing, since Voyager Mobile consists of about seven employees, mostly family and friends. But though Mardini is only 22, this is his third start-up, having already built up businesses in music equipment and IT services.

Mardini says the goal with Voyager is to offer customers low monthly prices. Voyager is pitching $19 (plus taxes) a month for unlimited talking and texting, and $39 (plus taxes) for talking, texting and Web use.

“I pay so much for my cellphone,” Mardini said in an interview last week. “I was thinking there has to be a better way to make it cheaper for everyone.”

The company was all set to start taking orders on Tuesday, but the Web-site issues forced a few days’ delay.

Things are up and running now, with Voyager offering a range of prepaid devices, including a pair of Android phones at $219 and Samsung’s Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch for $549.

For a limited time, customers can bring their iPhones, regardless of carrier, to any Sprint store and receive $100 off the purchase of an iPhone 4S with the activation of a new line (upgrades are not included in this promotion).

New customers can receive their discount in two ways. You can either reserve the smartphone online and receive an instant $100 discount when you pick it up in the store and bring in your old iPhone, or you can purchase the phone online and then fill out a trade-in form to receive a credit to your account.

More than the discount, though, it may be Sprint’s unlimited data plans that attract new customers. Just this week, a Verizon executive suggested that subscribers who have existing unlimited data plans might not be able to keep them if they decide to upgrade their phone once the carrier’s new shared data plans arrive later this summer. Meanwhile, Sprint gives existing and new customers unlimited access to data on their smartphones.

Sprint’s iPhone 4S promotion begins today for a limited time, but the carrier did not reveal when the offer will end.

In a blog post on Friday, the No. 4 carrier rejected the idea that pooled data plans will end up being a better value.

“Do families really want to keep track of each others’ data consumption?” T-Mobile said. “We don’t think so. Just imagine mom’s email is suddenly unavailable because her teenage son watched an HD movie on his phone, consuming the family’s data allotment.”

Verizon has said it will offer tiered data plans starting in midsummer, while AT&T has said it is working on a family data plan of its own. Sprint, meanwhile, is keeping its focus on unlimited plans as well.

T-Mobile acknowledges that bandwidth is a limited resource, but says that shared data is not the way to go.

Not at all.

“We’re very happy with it,” Hesse said of Sprint’s deal with Apple, during the company’s annual shareholders meeting Tuesday. “Carrying the iPhone will be quite profitable.”

But not for a few years, at least.

By its own admission, Sprint won’t profit from the device until 2015. But according to Hesse, who was reelected to Sprint’s board during Tuesday’s proceedings, that initial heavy upfront investment in the iPhone is worthwhile because it will slow subscriber turnover and create a new segment of higher-value subscribers.

“We believe in the long term,” Hesse said. “And over time we will make more money on iPhone customers than we will on other customers.”

And there, it would seem, Hesse does have a point. Sprint sold 1.5 million iPhones in its first quarter, with about 44 percent of them going to new customers. And those sales helped spike Sprint’s average revenue per user 6.9 percent, the largest year-over-year increase ever charted in that metric in the U.S.

“The US availability of the HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE has been delayed due to a standard U.S. Customs review of shipments that is required after an ITC exclusion order,” HTC said in a statement to AllThingsD. “We believe we are in compliance with the ruling and HTC is working closely with Customs to secure approval. The HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE have been received enthusiastically by customers and we appreciate their patience as we work to get these products into their hands as soon as possible.”

HTC has been in a patent battle with Apple, which won an exclusion order late last year for certain HTC phones.

The HTC One X is bound for AT&T, while the HTC Evo 4G LTE is headed to Sprint and was due to go on sale on Friday.

Sprint declined to comment beyond HTC’s statement. An AT&T spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

HTC has been counting on its One line (along with the Evo for Sprint and a new Droid Incredible model for Verizon) to help it regain its footing.

Mardini, with the backing of family and friends, is launching Voyager Mobile, a start-up that aims to bring cut-rate cellphone services to the masses. The company is launching with two rate plans with service via Sprint’s network. The company will charge $19 a month for unlimited talk and text, and $39 (plus tax) for unlimited talk, text and Web.

The 22-year-old Mardini, who is entering his senior year at New York University, told AllThingsD that he decided to get into the cellphone business after noticing how high his bill had gotten.

“It was just one of those things,” he said in a telephone interview. “I pay so much for my cellphone. I was thinking there has to be a better way to make it cheaper for everyone.”

Despite the low prices, Mardini said he believes he can offer a range of phones, including some fairly high-end Android devices, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S II, also known as the Epic 4G Touch. The company will also sell tablets, data cards and hotspots, though the rate plans for those have yet to be finalized.

Voyager is the latest in a growing number of companies looking to resell service on another carrier’s network.

Among the most high-profile such start-ups are Republic Wireless and FreedomPop.

The notion of a virtual mobile network operator has been around for a while. Some have persisted, while others — like ESPN Mobile and Disney Mobile — have faded. In recent months, though, a new wave of companies have cropped up, promising to bring new business models and economics to the wireless business.

Voyager Mobile has said it will announce details of its plans on Tuesday at 6 am ET. Its Web site promises unlimited service starting at $19 a month, but offers only the barest of details, along with a countdown clock. However, details started trickling out on Monday, including its rate plans and phone lineup, which were reported by several sites, including PhoneScoop and CNET.

Though still in college, Mardini has been involved with several other companies, with the first one tracing its roots back to some DJ gear that he got at age 9. The record business evolved into a local tech firm, and eventually led Mardini to launch Munifi Networks, a broader IT services company.

Mardini said he is using proceeds from those and other family businesses to launch Voyager, which is starting out with just seven employees, and is based in his hometown of Knoxville, Tenn. Given its tiny workforce, Voyager is relying on outsourcing to handle many aspects of its operations. Its small size is a key to the low prices, Mardini insists.

“In the end, we are able to offer the best price to our customers,” he said.

Update: Well, it looks like Voyager had some problems getting off the ground.

“During its Tuesday, May 15 launch, Voyager Mobile experienced a malicious network attack to its primary website: voyagermobile.com,” the company said on its Web site. “Due to the network outage, Voyager Mobile is postponing its launch to a time and date in the very near future.”

The company added that it won’t be derailed.

“Our goal of low cost wireless service for all will not be undermined and we strive to continue the voyage for a better wireless world,” it said.

On Twitter, Mardini said that the Web site was hit with a packet attack, and that the company is working to restore service.

Also, we weren’t the only ones to track down Mardini ahead of the launch. Fred Fishkin had an interview that ran before ours.

The latest evidence came Monday, as Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures teamed with chipmaker Nvidia to buy approximately 500 patents from IPWireless.

The patents include some related to 3G and 4G technologies, including LTE, the companies said. Terms of the deal, which closed at the end of last month, were not disclosed.

Ownership of the patents will be split between Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures, with Nvidia getting license to all of the patents it didn’t get to purchase.

Intellectual Ventures has already sued several major carriers over patents. In Febuary, it sued Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T, and last week it added U.S. Cellular to the proceedings. (Verizon Wireless, not named in the suit, is a licensee of Intellectual Ventures.)

iStockphoto | italianestro

Typically, the major carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, see some shift in their share but manage to post a cumulative gain in so-called postpaid customers.

This quarter, though, gains at Verizon and AT&T weren’t enough to offset the steep losses at T-Mobile, Sprint and other carriers. T-Mobile alone lost half a million contract customers in the January-to-March quarter, while Sprint lost 192,000 contract customers.

The Associated Press did the math and calculated a drop in the industry of 52,000 contract subscribers at the top seven carriers. That contrasts with the prepaid industry (both from the Big Four carriers and smaller players such as MetroPCS, Cricket and TracFone), which saw gains of two million customers in the quarter.

As brokerage Jefferies & Company noted ahead of the earnings report season, the cellphone industry tends to face a tough few months after the initial bump that follows the introduction of a new iPhone.

(Image courtesy of iStockphoto | italianestro)

Verizon announced its plans to buy the spectrum last December as part of a broader pact that includes a joint marketing agreement. It has said that, should regulators allow it to complete the deal, it will sell off some other spectrum, but T-Mobile and others have noted that the spectrum Verizon is offering to sell has some serious drawbacks.

T-Mobile and its partners, the Rural Cellular Association and Public Knowledge, plan to announce the new group — the Alliance for Broadband Competition — at a teleconference on Monday. Speakers will include the head of the RCA and Kathleen Ham, T-Mobile’s vice president of regulatory affairs.

Sprint is also a member of the group, though it is not listed as among the participants for Monday’s event.

“As we said in our brief, ‘Twitter’s Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users own their content,’” Twitter legal counsel Ben Lee said in a statement provided to AllThingsD. “Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.”

Twitter’s filing comes after Harris’s initial motion to quash was struck down in court. The court found that Harris lacked the legal standing to challenge the request for Twitter information on his own behalf.

Harris, a senior editor at online publication The New Inquiry, was arrested in conjunction with a massive Occupy Wall Street protest last October that blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. He was one of more than 700 people arrested.

In Harris’s defense, Twitter cites the First Amendment as grounds for support, contesting that “content that Twitter users create and submit to Twitter are clearly a form of electronic communication that, accordingly, implicates First Amendment protections.” Twitter also contends that the request is a Fourth Amendment violation (unlawful search and seizure, for those of you who skipped PoliSci 101).

The reasoning behind Twitter’s motion most likely boils down to two things: First, if Twitter users as a whole don’t have sufficient standing to defend themselves against subpoenas for information, it then becomes Twitter’s responsibility to do so. With a subscriber base of more than 140 million active users, that’s a lot of litigation to sort through. It’s simply a scaleability issue. So, on the one hand, Twitter filing a motion that would essentially put the defense back in Harris’s hands is essentially Twitter practicing enlightened self-interest.

But in another, more gallant way of viewing the case, the motion signals just how strong Twitter is on the right to privacy of its user base. Aside from safeguarding against a future of similar requests, Twitter doesn’t have to stick up for its users like this.

“In Internet meme parlance, Twitter is basically telling the government: ‘Come at me bro,’” privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian told AllThingsD in an interview.

And it’s not the first time Twitter has stood up to the government. Late last year, Twitter challenged a court order requesting information on a number of people involved with WikiLeaks, including Julian Assange. Specifically, Twitter challenged a “gag order” included in the request, which specifically barred the company from telling WikiLeaks members that the government was requesting their account information. By challenging the order, Twitter effectively let these account holders know that the government was going after their information, which allowed them in turn to defend themselves against the government requests.

This may not sound like much. But most of this litigation is dealt with by outside counsel which Twitter hired specifically to deal with these cases, and that isn’t cheap. And there’s no direct financial incentive for the company to stand up against a request for information such as this one.

In all, it’s a bold move by the microblogging company, and one it isn’t required to make.

“I think it is much to-do about nothing,” Sprint VP Fared Adib told AllThingsD in an interview on Tuesday. Customers sign up for two-year contracts, Adib said, and it makes sense for customers who want to have the latest technology get a device that will meet their needs throughout that time. People should be more concerned if Sprint weren’t doing that, he said.

“We’ve done this before,” he said. “So has every other carrier.”

Adib noted that Sprint’s LTE deployment, which will start with a few cities around midyear, will be faster than the rollout of prior technologies, including its 2G, 3G and WiMax networks.

Speaking of WiMax, Sprint may not be introducing new phones for its flagship brand, but it is now extending that technology to its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile prepaid services. Virgin and Boost both announced plans to start selling a WiMax device from HTC. (Virgin has a variant of the Evo 3D, while Boost will sell a phone similar to the traditional Evo 4G.)

The company has said it plans to continue offering WiMax service through at least 2015.

Also on Tuesday, Sprint announced a new bundle of family safety and security applications under the Sprint Guardian banner. The effort consists of a $10 per month service from Location Labs’ Safely unit and a $5 per month security service from Lookout.

Both services cover up to five devices, which could be a savings for families that have a bunch of Sprint phones.

Adding such services can help increase loyalty to Sprint among families with multiple devices — already a traditionally loyal group and a key source of revenue for all the major carriers.

“You might change phones and plans but you don’t change carriers,” Adib said of those customers.

One area where Sprint hasn’t been all that aggressive is in introducing devices running Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. Adib said that Sprint certainly took note of the slow initial sales globally for the first crop of Windows Phones.

Still, Adib said that the company is a longtime partner of Microsoft’s and expects to offer future Windows Phones, likely after the debut of Windows Phone 8.

“I don’t want to give you any specific dates,” he said.

But he said he is “very bullish” on Windows Phone overall and said the company has rapidly closed some of the gaps it had in terms of performance and capabilities. Adib said he has also been pleased to see the work Nokia has done in reintroducing itself in the U.S. with its first Lumia devices.

“I think we are going to continue to see that,” he said.

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Today, the San Francisco company says that Sprint is coming on board to join the three other major U.S. carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile.

While the partnership provides additional momentum for Boku, the company still has a way to go before consumers are charging all sorts of purchases to their carrier bills. Today, the majority of Boku-paid purchases are for digital goods, such as in-game currency like Facebook Credits, or virtual goods in social games from companies like Zynga.

In an interview, Boku president Ron Hirson explained that it will still be another year or so before it starts seeing physical goods like clothing or electronics being charged to a carrier bill. For that to happen, carriers will have to drop the rates even lower than what they are charging today in order to be on par with Visa or MasterCard.

Over the past two years, Hirson said, prices already have dropped from roughly 40 percent to somewhere in the “teens.”

“We are proving ourselves out, and showing to the carrier that with each incremental drop, we are growing the pie,” he said.

The next likely product category to adopt carrier billing, he said, is digital content, including music, books, or physical tickets for public transportation or concerts. Those items have a big enough profit margin to make paying slightly higher transaction fees affordable.

Other companies in the carrier billing space include Mopay, BilltoMobile and Zong, which eBay’s PayPal acquired last year. Boku strengthened its position earlier this year when it raised $35 million in fresh capital.

While carrier billing has been slow to take off, Hirson said the company believes it will be a huge opportunity because of the convenience factor. To purchase something, users enter their phone number, and then authenticate that payment via text message.

Boku said today that it also signed up a carrier-billing partnership with Deutsche Telekom in Germany, meaning that it is now processing transactions with every major carrier in France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.

The company also announced that it has added two executives to its team: Jon Prideaux, the former EVP at Visa, is joining as chief business officer; and Stuart Neal, the former managing director of international development for Barclaycard, is joining as SVP of Business Development.

The trend follows a more aggressive push by larger carriers, such as Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA, to capture users at the lowest end of the market, by such means as free phone offerings to those on government subsidies. Investors sent shares of MetroPCS and Leap sharply lower on Thursday.

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That’s the word from Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, who tells CNET that the carrier’s unlimited data plan has been far too much of a boon to its business to consider doing anything otherwise.

“I’m not anticipating the unlimited plan would change by that point,” Hesse said. “That’s our distinctive differentiator. Frankly, [the iPhone and unlimited data is] a marriage made in heaven.”

And that does appear to be true — to a point. Reporting first-quarter earnings today, Sprint said that 44 percent of iPhone sales during the period were to customers new to the carrier. “A huge percentage of our gross adds are iPhones, even though it’s a 3G device and it’s competing head to head with 4G devices,” Hesse said during Sprint’s earnings call.

Of course the next iteration of the iPhone is almost certain to be LTE-capable. So Sprint best get on the stick with its 4G network deployment, because its LTE network needs a lot of work. An iPhone with unlimited LTE data sounds great. Question is, can Sprint deliver that experience by the time the device launches?

Sprint Nextel suffered another ugly loss in its latest quarter, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Wall Street had expected and the company’s shares are on the rise as a result.

Reporting first quarter earnings this morning, the nation’s third largest wireless carrier posted a loss of $863 million, or 29 cents a share on revenue of $8.73 billion. That’s quite a bit larger than the loss of $439 million, or 15 cents, it suffered a year earlier. Still, it was better than the loss of 41 cents a share on revenue of $8.71 billion that analysts had been expecting.

But the good news ended there.

Sprint lost 192,000 contract subscribers during the quarter, a real disappointment after the rare gain in valuable wireless phone customers it managed last year. And it saw a decline in iPhone sales as well.

Sprint said it sold only 1.5 million iPhones in the quarter, a 17 percent drop from the quarter prior.

So, overall, not the best performance from a carrier that’s struggling amid intense competition from AT&T and Verizon Wireless. But it could have been worse.

Some argue that it is. BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk recently cut his rating on Apple, theorizing that U.S. carriers will soon rein in their iPhone subsidies in an effort to boost their own margins. And were that to happen, a significant contraction in iPhone sales would likely follow.

Question is: Will it happen? According to a new analysis from CLSA, the answer is probably no — at least not for the next 18 to 24 months.

Which is great news for Apple. CLSA figures iPhone subsidies accounted for $19 billion of Apple’s fiscal 2011 revenue. And about 46 percent of that came from North America. So if AT&T, Verizon and Sprint were to push to lower the subsidies they pay to sell the iPhone, Apple could take a revenue hit. Indeed, some observers have estimated that a $100 drop in the iPhone subsidy would trim $7.50 from Apple’s earnings-per-share for fiscal 2013.

But that’s an unlikely scenario.

Why? Because, CLSA argues, the structure of Apple’s carrier agreements will prevent it from occurring.

“We believe these are multiyear agreements which tend to stipulate subsidy policies up front,” CLSA analyst Avi Silver explains. “For the major carriers, we believe these agreements have most favored nation clauses so any offering from Apple to one carrier would have to be offered to the other. During the length of these multiyear agreements, we believe U.S. carriers would need permission from Apple to alter subsidy levels.”

And if that’s the case, they’re obviously going to have a difficult time getting it. More to the point, that hypothetical most-favored-nation clause — if it exists — is going to make it tough to trim iPhone subsidies for a while.

Says Silver, “For AT&T, we do not know when its multiyear agreement expires but Verizon and Sprint are likely locked in for some time. As a result, we think that an outright reduction in subsidies is an unlikely scenario in the U.S. market.”

Apple reports earnings after market close today.

Its U.S. presence has become more common at the low end of the Android market and at prepaid carriers as the high-end market has been dominated by the likes of Samsung and Motorola.

LG is hoping to improve its fortunes, starting with the Viper, a $99 LTE phone for Sprint. Among the markets LG hopes to target is busy parents.

“This is really easy to use and still has a ton of features,” LG spokesman Chaz Abbott said, showing off the phone.

To highlight its family-friendliness, LG has come up with a storytelling app that lets parents record a fairy tale using their own photos, sounds and words — sort of a Mad Libs for the digital era.

The Life’s Good Fairytale will eventually be free for all Android phones, though Viper owners will get first crack at the app, which is slated to be available for them starting April 27.

LG is showing off the phone and app later today at an event in New York. Unfortunately for LG, the N.Y. launch party market is almost as crowded as the Android smartphone one. Its event is up against both T-Mobile’s HTC One S launch and a party for Spotify.

The Viper, too, will find itself challenged to stand out. It launches at the same time Sprint is pushing out the Galaxy Nexus, a more high-end phone that also runs on the carrier’s nascent LTE network.

LG faces similar challenges outside the U.S. amid a host of Android competitors at all segments of the market.

Globally, LG is counting on a new lineup that includes a quad-core phone, a “phablet” and a new-look mainstream line.

Abbott said that LG has yet to announce U.S. plans for any of these devices, which were shown off at February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

And, depending on which of two studies you believe, both can lay claim to having the fastest network.

AT&T is pushing a PCWorld study that found its network to be the faster of the two.

“In our tests, AT&T’s new LTE network pumped out the fastest speeds of any 4G provider,” PCWorld senior editor Mark Sullivan said in a statement.

Verizon, meanwhile, calls attention to a RootMetrics study that finds that it has the better-performing of the LTE networks.

“While AT&T outperformed Verizon in pure LTE download speeds, Verizon had the clear upper hand in the more meaningful real-world experience of average download and upload speeds,” RootMetrics president Bill Moore said in a post on GigaOM. “AT&T’s LTE might be faster, but our overall experience with AT&T was still slower than what we found with Verizon.”

One thing is clear: Verizon’s network covers more ground. The company is launching more cities this week and with those will have two-thirds of the U.S. population covered. AT&T’s network is still smaller, but it is rapidly adding cities as well.

Sprint, meanwhile, is just gearing up to launch LTE, while T-Mobile is aiming to launch an LTE network next year.

Indeed, Jefferies & Co. said that the first quarter could mark the first time ever that the number of postpaid customers actually declined.

“A Jefferies proprietary handset survey suggests volume expectations for [the first quarter] are the weakest in years, in line with our view that net adds are significantly lower in the quarter after an iPhone launch,” analyst Thomas Seitz said in a research note.

Jefferies sees “modest” growth in traditional customers for AT&T and Verizon, but declines at both T-Mobile and Sprint, which saw a big jump last quarter — its first with an iPhone.

“We believe there is a distinct possibility that Q1 could be the first time that the postpaid market, as a whole, loses subscribers,” Seitz said. Seitz noted that sales tend to be weak in the quarter immediately preceding and immediately following the launch of a new iPhone model.

Sales of prepaid phones may have also seen slower growth in the quarter, Seitz said.

Nonetheless, the carriers should see some revenue growth, thanks in part to the continued growth of smartphones as well as recent price hikes.

But, with smartphones already making up a big chunk of the business and nearly everyone having a cellphone, Jefferies said the wireless providers will be challenged to continue to post gains.

“Voice revenues are already in decline,” Seitz said. “We believe a material drop off in the growth rate of data revenues from slowing smartphone adoption, particularly in (the second half of the year), is a growing risk.”