How does that saying go? For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction, right? Well, to that end, Sprint seems to be the "equal and opposite reaction" to AT&T's and Verizon's actions, posting a net subscriber loss and a stable ARPU at a time when its competitors are posting huge net adds and rising ARPUs. Year over year, The Now Network has hemorrhaged 2.1 million customers, 901,000 of whom bolted in this quarter alone in a $344 million vat of red ink; what's worse, it says losses will increase in the next due to a "seasonal uptick in churn." That doesn't really compute, unless Sprint is actively suggesting that people are more likely to leave its network in the third quarter of the year -- but we obviously understand the need to come up with interesting and creative excuses for bad news when it comes to an ugly earnings report. Any way you slice it, the big boys seem to be eating Sprint's lunch at the moment without a clear-cut path to turning the tables. The silver lining, we guess, is that analysts had expected 906,000 customers to bolt, a full 5,000 more than actually left -- but unless those 5,000 are each holding $1 million-per-month accounts, there's not much of a diff there.

[Via mocoNews]