All right, thank you, Justin. I wish you all could have heard it the first time, it was awesome. But I will try to make it fresh the second time.
So first of all, as an overall view of the quarter, it was clearly a very profitable quarter. It continues many of the positive trends we saw in the first quarter and those include strong profitability in cash flows for our largest segment, U.S. wireless, a stabilized U.S. wireless subscriber base and improved profitability and subscriber growth in the Island Wireless piece of our international operations.
Turning to the details. First, I'll start with U.S. wireless retail as usual. To reiterate my comments in the press release, we were certainly pleased to see positive net adds of nearly 5,000 for the quarter. Our team did a great job selling our value proposition in a historically weak quarter for retail sales.
In particular, prepaid sales, which really are typically weakest in the industry in the second and third quarters, were quite strong for us. And hence, we see this largely as a result of our opening up a significant new big box distribution channel.
Of course, as noted in our release, it will be difficult to repeat the subscriber performance in the third quarter for 2 reasons: First, the third quarter, as mentioned many times, is often the worst quarter for retail sales in this industry. And, second, we will experience a higher percentage of contract expirations in the coming quarters as a result of the large amount of upgrades started in about 2 years ago to deal with the 1-year contract bubble we inherited.
On the growth addition side, we added a little over 55,000 subs, that's up from about 39,000 a year ago and that's about even with the first quarter.
Prepaid gross adds were about 32,000, a bit more than 125% higher than the second quarter last year and down only slightly off of the seasonally strong first quarter.
This substantial increase in prepaid sales year-on-year was due to the launch of our best value plan from late 2011, expanded distribution, particularly the big box channel we referenced, and increased lifeline sales.
On a sequential basis, normally, we would see a decline from the first to second quarter in prepaid. Instead, it was essentially level, reflecting our expanded distribution, which was launched in May.
Postpaid gross adds were about 23,500, which is down 5% year-on-year, but it's up 5% on a consecutive quarter basis.
Despite the improvement, this continues to be a challenging area for us. We feel strongly that our value proposition is compelling and we'll continue to experiment with different marketing strategies to drive -- to try to drive higher sales. The positive response to our value proposition has occurred more quickly on the non-contract
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