T-Mobile to build LTE network in 2013 - crosses fingers for iPhone 6?

It’s official: within the next year or two, all four major US carriers will have LTE networks. The last holdout, T-Mobile, announced today that it will be building an LTE network, which will begin rolling out in 2013.

T-Mobile will invest $4 billion into the deployment. The $3 billion breakup fee (plus much more in assets) that it received from AT&T is likely
sparking the move. T-Mobile has struggled to keep up the other three US carriers. In terms of subscribers, it’s the number four US carrier, after Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint (in descending order).

AT&T repeatedly claimed that if the government blocked its proposed merger with T-Mobile, prices would rise, service would degrade, and the world would come to a fiery end. As it turns out, things don’t look quite that bad. Two years from now, every high-end smartphone in the US will probably be LTE-capable, with much of the country blanketed by at least one of the carriers’ LTE networks. With four high speed carriers competing for our business instead of just three, how will we be worse off?

Of course all is not peaches and cream for T-Mobile. Even though it will soon have LTE, it doesn’t yet have the iPhone. Now that the other three carriers sell Apple’s popular handset, T-Mobile is losing subscribers at a steady pace. The carrier just announced that it lost a net 526,000 customers in the fourth quarter.

Some have speculated that T-Mobile didn’t get the iPhone 4S in 2011 because Apple wanted its carriers to be ready for an LTE iPhone 5 this year. Verizon and AT&T have LTE, and Sprint will be rolling out its LTE network (probably) before the next iPhone launches, so the logic is sound. Perhaps T-Mobile is hoping to have its LTE network ready for the iPhone 6, iPhone 5S, or whatever the 2013 iPhone is called.

via T-Mobile

Source: www.geek.com