T-Mobile has no plan B for the Sprint merger, stay tuned for a November 7 announcement
While waxing poetic during a conference call with analysts about its "blockbuster" quarter that brought it record low postpaid churn and 26 consecutive quarters of more than 1 million total net customer additions, T-Mobile threw in some light over its merger with Sprint and 5G rollout plans.
We've been building this thing almost from the outside in, because we have to clear broadcasters in the major metros that were sitting on that spectrum... Much of that work done now, we're ahead of the schedule materially compared to the original schedule that was put in place in partnership with the FCC three years ago, and so real great benefit coming through not just in metros, but across the country and specifically in rural… We’re building now, we're building through the quarter, and we'll be back at it again in 2020.
It turns out that the synergies with Sprint's coveted midband spectrum will be so great that T-Mobile's CTO could only muster: "I’m not sure my head even floats there… there’s only one plan, and that’s combining with Sprint."
The 5G on 600MHz network is ahead of schedule, commented Neville Ray, and is covering 8000+ cities, while 26 million T-Mobile subscribers already have a phone that is able to take advantage of the spectrum on their phones:
No slowdown on 600 megahertz. Moving into 2020, that buildout will continue, and it’s nationwide spectrum that it's leveraging. Big, big push on rural for us within this footprint.
We've been building this thing almost from the outside in, because we have to clear broadcasters in the major metros that were sitting on that spectrum... Much of that work done now, we're ahead of the schedule materially compared to the original schedule that was put in place in partnership with the FCC three years ago, and so real great benefit coming through not just in metros, but across the country and specifically in rural… We’re building now, we're building through the quarter, and we'll be back at it again in 2020.
T-Mobile is currently waiting on the beginning of a multistate lawsuit over the merger December 9, but in the meantime it is ironing out the kinks with regulators around the 5G rollout in rural areas, the post-merger pricing, and the divestment of its prepaid brands to the new competitor Dish.
The ever-positive CEO John Legere, however, is only considering these discussions and the lawsuit as temporary hurdles and expects the deal to close in the first half of 2020. It has plans waiting in the wings to incorporate Sprint's coveted spectrum immediately after, and will even announce the first "un-carrier" commitments of the resulting New T-Mobile entity as soon as next Monday, November 7.
We hope that will be concrete plans, prices and coverage maps to see then, as both carriers seem bent on doing everything that is humanly possible in order to merge and provide synergies of scale. T-Mobile's net income of $870 million during the last quarter pales compared to what Verizon or AT&T are hauling in, and the merger with Sprint may put an end to its lean and mean growth phase.
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