After 5G coverage, now T-Mobile beats Verizon and AT&T in another key metric
The T-Mobile-Sprint merger finally closed on April 1st, 23 months after being announced by the carriers' CEOs at the time, John Legere and Marcelo Claure. T-Mobile wanted to make the purchase in order to obtain Sprint's mid-band 2.5GHz spectrum.
This allows T-Mobile to put into place its 5G triple layer cake made up of low band, mid-band, and mmWave spectrum. T-Mobile says that its capacity after six years will be 14 times what it would have had without Sprint's mid-band spectrum.
Needless to say, as you walk along the street, that store you used to pass by with the bright yellow letters on the sign, is going to look different. While some Sprint stores are being changed to T-Mobile locations, others, where a Sprint and a T-Mobile store are in close proximity, have just closed for good.
T-Mobile is now the carrier with the most retail stores
All those closures of Sprint stores have been more than offset by the rebranded ones, to such an extent, that T-Mobile now is the US carrier with the most retail locations. According to Jeff Moore at Wave7, the carrier now has more than 7,500 retail stores.
While down from the combined 8,800 number of the two carriers before the merger, the number is still with a few hundred higher than the previous retail champion Verizon, and way up from AT&T's 5,500 stores.
This news comes hot on the heels of T-Mobile becoming the second US carrier by subscriber base, with 98.3 million customers until June, surpassing AT&T's 92.9 million postpaid and prepaid customers in the last quarter.
Yet "another feather in T-Mobile’s cap," as Jeff Moore puts it, and, apparently, the Un-carrier can no longer claim the underdog status, what with the largest retail presence, second largest subscriber base, and the widest 5G net, albeit in the low- to mid-bands.
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