AT&T started the year with a mix of subscriber gains and losses in its core businesses, with losses in TV and postpaid phone customers to go along with increases in DirecTV and its overall total of wireless subscriptions.

In wireless, AT&T ended the quarter with 363,000 fewer postpaid phone subscribers, the company said yesterday. This loss coincided with T-Mobile USA adding 877,000 postpaid phone customers, mostly at the expense of AT&T. "According to [T-Mobile CEO John] Legere, approximately 80 percent of postpaid port-ins come from rival carriers AT&T and Verizon, with the lion’s share coming from AT&T," Wireless Week reported yesterday. (Verizon Wireless lost 8,000 postpaid phone customers in the quarter, though it added 640,000 retail postpaid customers overall.)

On the plus side for AT&T, most of its postpaid phone losses came from customers with feature phones. The average smartphone subscriber pays AT&T twice as much as a feature phone user. Overall, AT&T has 58.3 million postpaid smartphone subscribers, accounting for 88 percent of its postpaid phone customers. That proportion is growing, as smartphones accounted for 97 percent of AT&T's new phone sales in the quarter.

AT&T sells wireless subscriptions in several other categories, including the prepaid Cricket and GoPhone divisions, tablets, and connected devices such as smartwatches, mobile hotspots, and cars. An increase of 1.6 million connected device subscriptions helped push AT&T up to 130 million total wireless subscribers. That's an increase of 1.8 million in the quarter and 8.7 million over the past 12 months. Total wireless revenue was $9.63 billion, up from $9.41 billion a year ago.

AT&T is shifting its pay-TV focus to satellite but its satellite gains weren't enough to offset subscriber losses in the wireline U-verse TV business. DirecTV added 328,000 satellite TV subscribers in the first quarter, while total video subscribers were down 54,000 because U-verse lost 382,000 subscribers. DirecTV has about 20 million subscribers overall, while U-verse TV has more than 5 million.

Home Internet subscriptions remained steady. AT&T reported a net gain of 186,000 "IP broadband" to bring its total up to 12.5 million. But AT&T lost 181,000 DSL customers, reducing that total to 1.75 million.

Overall, AT&T reported $40.5 billion in quarterly revenue, up 24 percent year-over-year, mostly because of the DirecTV acquisition that was completed in July. Operating income was $7.1 billion, up from $5.6 billion in Q1 2015.