It is not very often that a perceived smaller company or entity buys over a bigger one, but that is somewhat the case with MetroPCS and T-Mobile whose merger was approved last week. Sure, both of them are mobile carriers in their own right in the US, so what does this merger mean for you, the end consumer? Folks who are on MetroPCS will seem to have the proverbial upper hand here so to speak, where T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer, Neville Ray claims that both T-Mobile and MetroPCS have moved toward a similar next-generation LTE network on the AWS 1700 band, meaning T-Mobile has every intention to expedite plans so that MetroPCS subscribers will be able to be “transferred” over to T-Mobile’s smartphones in due time.
Ray said, “This isn’t about integrating these two networks. It’s about moving MetroPCS over to a bigger and stronger converged network.” In a nutshell, T-Mobile will soon sell phones with MetroPCS branding, although these will still run on T-Mobile’s network. They have targeted two years for a full user migration, with plans to decommission the CDMA network in order to free up additional spectrum for LTE.