ATLANTA -- Cingular Wireless LLC, which is a joint venture of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and BellSouth Corporation (NYSE: BLS), today reported record-setting net income of $847 million for the third quarter, which is a year-over-year increase of over 280 percent.

The company also achieved a year-over-year increase in ARPU, normalized OIBDA margins that were the best since 2001, and the completion of its GSM network integration.

"Cingular turned in a great third quarter on a variety of fronts. Solid execution drove a significant increase in net income, growth in ARPU, and strong margin performance," said Stan Sigman, Cingular's president and chief executive officer.

"Cingular's strong financial and operational performance positions us well as wireless capabilities and our customers' demand for new wireless voice, data, and video services continue to increase," Sigman said. "Our work is not yet done in bringing even better results, services, and capabilities to our customers."

Cingular's normalized OIBDA margin* was 35.6 percent in the third quarter, which is an improvement of 400 basis points compared to normalized year-ago results and a sequential improvement of 300 basis points.

For the quarter, the nation's largest wireless provider reported postpaid churn of 1.5 percent, equal to the company's best-ever results. This is a year-over-year improvement of 50 basis points and flat compared to the second quarter of 2006.

Overall monthly subscriber churn was 1.8 percent, which represents a year- over-year improvement of 50 basis points and a sequential increase of 10 basis points. The sequential increase resulted from normal seasonality patterns, the sunsetting of AT&T Wireless' prepaid plans, and from certain actions the company took to recover increased costs associated with serving the rapidly diminishing base of its TDMA customers.

Cingular's net additions were driven by lower churn and strong gross customer additions. The company reported 1.4 million net adds. Cingular's performance in net adds compares to 867,000 in the year-ago quarter and to 1.5 million in the second quarter of 2006. Some 928,000 of the 1.4 million net adds were postpaid customers, marking the company's third consecutive quarter of postpaid net adds nearly at or above the 900,000 level.

Cingular Wireless