Mike Sievert
President and Chief Executive Officer at T-Mobile US
Okay. Thanks, Jud. Well, my buddy and I here are excited to be here today to discuss another remarkable year at T-Mobile. We shared with you a year ago that 2021 would be a foundational year for us as a merged company, a year in which we set bold goals for ourselves in terms of customer growth, profitability, network, leadership and merger integration. While we not only exceeded our own targets, but also Wall Street's expectations. We are experiencing the greatest growth momentum in our history, setting record customer growth and service revenue growth, all because of the important investments we've made and we'll continue to make in our network leadership and in underpenetrated markets. This momentum sets us up for a very strong 2022, with plans to deliver another year of industry-leading postpaid growth, 10% in core adjusted EBITDA and over 30% growth in free cash flow at the midpoint of our guidance. We have big aspirations for this year as Peter will explain more about in a minute.
Our historic network build is a driving force behind our growth opportunity, and it's central to unlocking our merger synergies. For the second year in a row, we set an audacious goal for Neville and the technology team and they crushed it yet again. We set our sights on getting Ultra Capacity 5G to 200 million people, and the team blew right past that goal reaching 210 million in 2021. This is no small feat when you consider that it takes roughly three times the number of cell site upgrades to get from 100 [Phonetic] million to 200 [Phonetic] million. And that gives you a sense of the challenge that AT&T and Verizon have ahead of them. Once they woke up to our 5G lead and differentiation, they finally began lighting up mid-band 5G POPs, but still only 10s of millions compared to our hundreds of millions.
According to their own build plan, it will take them multiple years to reach 200 million [Phonetic] people. And they still won't be anywhere near the depth of mid-band spectrum that we're putting to work across our larger footprint. This demonstrates the remarkable deployment machine that we have spent years building and how hard it is to replicate. And don't forget our Extended Range 5G reached 94% of all Americans at the end of 2021 with speeds double that of typical LTE. This reinforces the importance of not just having the best spectrum portfolio, but how quickly T-Mobile puts spectrum to work for the benefit of consumers and businesses.
We continue to add to our mid-band portfolio with our recent purchase in Auction 110. Once again our prudent and opportunistic approach meant that we concentrated on supplementing our mid-band spectrum holdings in major urban and suburban areas, mostly aligned with our C-band purchases, and importantly, in places where these frequencies are well suited to the density of our network grid. That means we'll be able to deliver meaningful customer benefit with very little network capital and opex using existing towers, thanks to our completed agreements with American Tower and Crown Castle, and we're not slowing down.
We continue to extend our years-long 5G lead on the competition and independent network experts continue to recognize this. More than 20 reports from third-party testing firms in the last year confirmed T-Mobile is tops in 5G speed and coverage. In Ookla's latest testing, T-Mobile delivered a clean sweep of every category, and we're not just talking about individual 5G category wins like speed and availability. This is important. T-Mobile also won for overall network performance, meaning customers have a winning experience on the T-Mobile network period. Opensignal's new report published last week states that T-Mobile customers enjoy the fastest 5G speeds and can connect to 5G more often and in more places than anyone else, and the gap has only gotten wider as we keep increasing our speeds and reach. Meanwhile, AT&T somehow managed to see their 5G speeds gets lower year-over-year with an LTE like 49 megabits per second.
Okay, let's talk about our industry-leading growth. Last year, we posted the best growth in our Company's history. Across the entire span of our years-long Un-carrier journey, our best postpaid net add growth ever was in 2021. Our Magenta brand momentum is just incredible. And we added 1.2 million postpaid account net adds doubling 2020's adds, the highest reported in the industry yet again. This measure of total billing relationships is the best barometer of winning the switching decisions in the industry, something we're famous for as the Un-carrier. And our highest ever postpaid net adds were 5.5 million, leading the industry for the seventh consecutive year and exceeding the guidance that we raised again just last quarter. And our 2.9 million postpaid phone net adds were up 32% from last year, even during our -- our accelerated Sprint customer integration. Thanks to the strength of our Magenta brand, we're delivering at best ever levels. Our Magenta postpaid phone churn in 2021 was the lowest in the industry for the second year in a row.
We exited the year with great momentum as well. In Q4, we not only had the highest phone gross adds in the industry, but also the highest in our history. This last quarter, interesting fact, our Magenta postpaid porting ratio was above 1.5 times in Q4, and we're seeing those ratios trend even higher against AT&T and Verizon so far in Q1, while seeing our overall phone churn so far in Q1 moved down seasonally just as expected. And to put this underlying momentum into perspective, if the Sprint churn was the same as the Magenta churn, postpaid phone net adds in Q4 would have been closer to 1.4 million and would represent the highest quarterly postpaid phone net adds in our history. And I couldn't be more excited about high-speed Internet, where T-Mobile was the fastest growing broadband provider in the industry in Q4.
Let me say that again, in Q4, T-Mobile and not Comcast, not Charter or AT&T or Verizon posted the most broadband net adds in the industry, and we're just getting started. And mobile customers are taking our Magenta MAX plan in record numbers, with over 55% of new customers choosing our best plan. This wasn't part of our playbook before and is now a tailwind as our continuously improving network perception and competitive device offers are enticing customers right to the top of our rate card. And there is still a huge potential upside here, as fewer than 15% of our postpaid phone customers are on Magenta MAX or equivalent plans. This affects ARPU and ARPA. When we shared our plan with you at Analyst Day last year, we assumed postpaid phone ARPU would decline 1% every year through 2023 consistent with our historical trends and any benefit from Magenta MAX would be upside to the plan.
Well, you're already seeing that upside, as we just delivered flat ARPU, actually up $0.01 [Phonetic] in 2021. And not to steal Peter's thunder, but on the strength of this trend, we now see postpaid phone ARPU being flat to slightly up in 2022 for the first time ever. In addition, we're -- we've seen our prime mix of credit apps increase year-over-year, every quarter in 2021, showing that our network and brand is consistently attracting some of the industry's best customers. We're off to a great start bringing the same winning formula to smaller markets and rural areas. This is 40% of the country where we haven't meaningfully played before. We're growing our presence here as we expand the reach of our distribution and network. In just one year, our share has grown from approximately 13% to roughly 15%. Our share of port-ins in smaller markets and rural areas has increased multiple percentage points year-over-year, and these markets accounted for more than a third of our new accounts. This is one place our network leadership is beginning to shine. We're already the only 5G game in town for many of these communities.
Our Extended Range 5G provides speeds more than double the average LTE and reaches nearly five times more geographic coverage than Verizon's 5G. And we are rapidly rolling out our Ultra Capacity 5G to more of these communities in an unprecedented clip, expanding our mid-band 5G coverage to five times the land area that we cover today by the end of next year as we move from 210 million people covered to over 300 million exiting 2023.
Meanwhile, AT&T and Verizon have finally started rolling out mid-band 5G, and hope to soon be where we were almost two years ago. I'll say it again, we're two years ahead of AT&T and Verizon in 5G and two years from now, we'll still be two years ahead. T-Mobile for Business had another great year, as enterprise and government customers continue to do hands-on testing and when they do, they see the strength of our network. This differentiation on the network experience is delivering win share well above our market share.
Just to put that in perspective, we're already today at a win share in enterprise and government that would get us to our targeted 20% market share by 2025, that's if we just hold our win share at current levels and we've still got room to run. We are in many ways just beginning the expansion of our solutions and capabilities. Last week, others said they were still in proof of concept for advanced 5G network solutions, like mobile edge compute and private networks that they hope to commercialize at some point in the future. At T-Mobile, we already have commercial revenue-generating agreements for advanced 5G solutions with multiple large corporations, including the federal government and a very large logistics company. I'm excited about building on our momentum with businesses in 2022 with our ever-expanding 5G network lead.
And let me just go back and touch just a little bit more on high-speed Internet. At the beginning of 2021, we were actually still in pilot. While we closed out the year with 646,000 customers, far exceeding our 500,000 target, it's abundantly clear that customers are loving the network performance and the simplicity of this 5G based product. And with roughly 40% of high-speed Internet customers being new to T-Mobile, it creates another front door to fuel our mobile growth. We're excited about the revenue and margin contribution potential of this business as we ramp up further this year and next, as our planned network capacity really hits its pace. T-Mobile 5G Home Internet is ready for its prime-time moment, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised by how mainstream this product really is with our unique 5G network capacity to back it up.
Okay, let's touch on our progress on our accelerated merger integration. While our Magenta business is firing on all cylinders, we're also successfully powering through the transition of the higher churning Sprint customers faster than planned. At our Analyst Day last year, we laid out our post-merger plan to accelerate our integration bringing many of our biggest milestones forward by a year or more. The Sprint customer network migration is an essential part of this integration. At the end of 2021, 64% of Sprint customers had been migrated onto the T-Mobile network, well ahead of the 60% target that we laid out back at Analyst Day. This is impressive in one year when you consider that less than 10% were migrated at the end of 2020. As we've previously said, we expect the billing migration to be relatively seamless to the customer as we begin to ramp up this final part of the integration over the course of 2022 and into the first half of 2023.
As we enter the homestretch in '22 for many of our Sprint customer integration initiatives, we believe that Q4 of '21 was the high watermark for churn in terms of our overall postpaid phone churn during the integration. Having seen the integration results so far, we're now confident that churn will improve because we've seen the performance of a now material cohort of migrations. As customers migrate to fully compatible devices anchored on the T-Mobile network and have a new EIP instead of leasing, they show churn rates similar to our Magenta customers. A sizable minority of Sprint customers have now hit these milestones. Completing these upgrades and migrations won't happen overnight, but the bottom-line is simple, while others are temporarily padding their net adds from elaborate -- elevated Sprint churn today, we are working to make that very short-lived, which will create a growth tailwind for us as you saw from our underlying Magenta performance, while simultaneously creating a corresponding headwind for them, and we like those kinds of trends.
Okay, finally, before I wrap up, I do want to touch on our accomplishments as a leading corporate citizen in our industry. We not only set and exceeded our bold business and financial goals in '21, we also stayed true to our commitments to use our new network, scale and resources for good, building a more connected, equitable and sustainable future for all of our stakeholders. T-Mobile was the first telecom to commit to sourcing 100% of our total electricity usage with renewable energy. And we're proud to announce this week that we're the first to achieve that goal, just another example of where we're leading the industry. We also further extended our leadership position in helping to bridge the digital divide.
We're removing economic and geographic barriers in multiple ways. Our centerpiece is Project 10Million, which has already connected 3.2 million students with free or subsidized service. And we're expanding our high-speed Internet availability to millions of rural households, providing an important new connectivity option right where it's needed most. We also have an active participation in the government's affordable connectivity program through Metro by T-Mobile and Assurance Wireless, providing lower cost subsidized connectivity for many at a time when it's needed most.
Okay. So let me sum it up. 2021 was our best year ever, and that's just because '22 hasn't happened yet. Our positioning to simultaneously offer the best network and the best value is working, while we also rush to successfully expand into big underpenetrated segments. We saw strong ongoing growth ahead, we see it ahead in 2022 with a strategy that is really resonating with customers. Our network excellence has unlocked unprecedented growth for our Magenta brand, allowing us to move upmarket in urban and suburban areas with prime consumers and with enterprises and government.
And at the same time, we've expanded our reach into smaller markets and rural areas and new G product categories like high-speed Internet. We delivered big milestones in each of these areas in 2021, that really demonstrate our growth thesis with results. That customer growth helped to deliver industry-leading service revenue growth, and combined with our accelerated execution on our merger synergies has enabled us to nearly double our free cash flow year-over-year in 2021. Only T-Mobile has this unique recipe with permission to win and room to run across multiple paths to unlock the massive shareholder value potential of this business. I'm incredibly excited to carry our momentum into 2022. This is a huge year, and there is no team, I'd rather tackle it with.
So Peter, over to you.