By 
Only a day after word surfaced of talks between T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom and MetroPCS with an aim to merge the two US carriers, a deal has been reached, according to The Wall Street Journal. MetroPCS and DT board members have come to an agreement to combine the operations of T-Mobile and MetroPCS, with the latter maintaining a 26 percent share of the company and receiving a $1.5 billion payout, reports Financial Times Deutschland.
The deal will still need to pass the necessary regulatory approvals, but that shouldn’t be as insurmountable an issue as it was for DT the last time they attempted to broker a deal with their US branch of operations. Attempting to sell off T-Mobile to AT&T in 2011, the move was shot down by US governing bodies.
[via Endgadget]
Wow. OK so what abut the 2 different protocols? Does this mean t-mobilers get LTE?
I’m guessing tmobile will try to move people on metropcs over to tmobile so they can shut down that network, modify it, and relaunch it as tmobiles network
Great idea reframe metros CDMA freqencies for lte
CDMA and GSM networks, it feels like Sprint/Nextel again.
not that hard to do. GSM is a form of TDMA. just change some radios.
GSM is 2G… which T-Mo is getting rid of with much haste. W-CDMA… otherwise known as UMTS and upgraded to HSPA+ is 3G. Which is an easy change for them. And what T-Mo has been re-farming their own PCS network in to.
[sarcasm]totally the same[/sarcasm]… aside from the fact this isn’t iDEN that needs to be left online for a number of years per the agreement, or that iDEN interfered with public safety radios and needed to be relocated within its band, and lose spectrum for a guard band …
Or the biggest similarity, that a CDMA to W-CDMA re-farm is rather easy. AT&T re-farmed Alltel to W-CDMA in a few short months thru all of their divested areas from Verizon in all of North & South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming and their smaller pickups across 15 other states.
Had no idea who MetroPCS was until this. Just read up on them. Still stymied by this one. Sounds like TMo will have to redo the entire MetroPCS LTE network as it doesn’t sound very good from what I’ve read so far.
Yeah MetroPOS’s LTE is slower than Verizon’s 3G
Don’t feel bad. I didn’t know who they were either until my friend at the time got it. The sales guy told her that they were one of the three major US carriers (lol) and that anyone on Verizon back in 2008 was going to have no service when they switched off their analog network in favor of digital. I laughed at her and made fun of her for falling for his horrible sales trickery.
I hope this brings LTE much sooner to T-Mobile.
Why? HSPA+ 42 is as good as current LTE deployments. I can’t wait for T-Mobile to refarm EDGE areas to HSPA 42
NICE!
it would be nice to see t-mobile with the prices of metros service
I’m glad to see that after the failed buyout by AT&T that T Mobile is rising up and focusing on building again. Can not wait to switch to them when the Note II drops!!!
Um……. you do know that TMo is being abandoned by its parent company in these merger attempts, right? They are not rising up. They are just slowly crawling to being irrelevant.
No. T-Mobile isn’t being “abandoned.” Deutsche Telekom wants to sell off T-Mo because they don’t want to do business in the US mobile markets any longer. Although MetroPCS is…let’s just say “not the best company'” (I am being very kind here), they still have existing infrastructure, which adds value to T-Mobile US.
As for “slowly crawling to being irrelevant,” T-Mobile, and it’s international subsidaries make up the 3rd largest international mobile provider in the world, behind only Vodaphone and Telefonica
T-Mobile is still turning a profit or only recently hasn’t while Sprint has failed to turn a profit for 4 years and Sprint isn’t crawling to irrelevance, it’s on the rise.
I don’t see how they are being abandoned when they are keeping the TMobile name and will have a 74% control of metro.