T-Mobile Merges With MetroPCS

By Wolfgang Gruener
published

T-Mobile USA announced that it will merge with MetroPCS and add 9.3 million new customers to its base of 33.2 million customers.

T-Mobile USA parent company Deutsche Telekom will pay $1.5 billion in cash to MetroPCS shareholders, plus 26 percent ownership in the new company. Deutsche Telekom will hold the remaining 74 percent.

Deutsche Telekom confirmed the deal early Wednesday and said that it intends to continue its strategy to position the company, which will retain the T-Mobile brand, as a value carrier in the U.S. market. The merger provides Deutsche Telekom with a partial solution to solve the problem of T-Mobile's high customer churn and enable a path toward LTE deployment for its subscribers. According to a statement, the combination of T-Mobile and MetroPCS spectrums will create a "path to at least 20x20 MHz of 4G LTE in many areas."

While such an acquisition will not give T-Mobile an opportunity to compete with AT&T and Verizon, it may have a much better position to challenge Sprint Nextel, which had 56 million subscribers at the end of the second quarter. 42.4 million subscribers are estimated to give the combined T-Mobile USA about $42.8 billion in revenue for the fiscal year of 2012.

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Wolfgang Gruener
14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dark_wizzie
    Everybody buys everybody out, everybody sues everybody. Tech news summarized.
    Reply
  • frombehind
    it was about time someone absorbed that Metro PieCe of S#!t...
    Reply
  • nurgletheunclean
    T-mobile's Wifi calling is a killer app. I am so surprised the big boys haven't caught on. This effectively eliminates dead spots in critical locations like the home and office.
    Reply
  • Azn Cracker
    T-mobiles wifi calling app sucks for some phones... Always disconnects and sometimes cannot connect even thought wifi signal is max. However, its great for other phones I guess.

    Also I think t-mobile is the best out of the 4 big carriers. They have the lowest prices for their monthly plan and have decent phones.
    Reply
  • RabidFace
    MetroPCS is CDMA. T-Mobile is GSM. How is this going to work exactly? Are they going to make all the customers of MetroPCS buy new phones? Just throwing that out there. I haven't done any research how exactly this is going to work. But when I still lived in the Bay Area, MetroPCS is the Cricket of Portland, horrible, horrible service.
    Reply
  • lilotimz
    RabidFaceMetroPCS is CDMA. T-Mobile is GSM. How is this going to work exactly? Are they going to make all the customers of MetroPCS buy new phones? Just throwing that out there. I haven't done any research how exactly this is going to work. But when I still lived in the Bay Area, MetroPCS is the Cricket of Portland, horrible, horrible service.
    Yep. They're going to phase out the CDMA network and have prepaid customers "upgrade" to gsm phones. The integration of the overlapping networks are going to hurt but the spectrum in several markets are going to be substantial. LA, NYC, and chicago (?) are going to have 10x10 or even 20x20 spectrum available iirc.

    But... eh...
    Reply
  • nebun
    just because two useless companies merge, it does not make it better
    Reply
  • NeatOman
    For people that say t-mobiles wifi calling doesn't work well, they might need a new router or you have lot of interference. You can have a bad router and not really notice the drops. I would recommend you check out WiFi Analizer for android, helps a lot (inSSIDer for windows).

    WiFi calling works great for me but causes a lot of problems if you have a flacky wifi connection.
    Reply
  • southernshark
    T-mobile Good, Metro PCS bad.

    Hopefully the T-mobile philosophy will win out.

    They have great customer service and really try to help their customers.
    Reply
  • southernshark
    NeatOmanFor people that say t-mobiles wifi calling doesn't work well, they might need a new router or you have lot of interference. You can have a bad router and not really notice the drops. I would recommend you check out WiFi Analizer for android, helps a lot (inSSIDer for windows).WiFi calling works great for me but causes a lot of problems if you have a flacky wifi connection.
    \My mother uses it and it works fine. There is no cell reception in her area so she has no choice but go this route and it works quite well. The people who it does not work for most likely have shitty internet connections and/or bad modems.
    Reply