Well now, I’m sure that everyone knows that AT&T had designed in the past on acquiring T-Mobile USA, a deal that fell through and gave T-Mobile USA a sum of cash along with spectrum, and it appears that T-Mobile USA could be putting that extra cash to use by considering making an acquisition of their own.
According to the guys over at Ubergizmo by way of Bloomberg, the word is that T-Mobile is in talks with MetroPCS with a view to acquiring the US carrier, although apparently both T-Mobile and MetroPCS are keeping mum on the matter.
In the past there has been talk of T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom selling off T-Mobile completely as with the failed AT&T attempt, or even possibly a merger, and now it would appear at least a merger between T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS could be on the cards.
Although a possible merger of T-Mobile and MetroPCS would bring new customers to T-Mobile’s customer base there are some hurdles that both carriers would need to sort out, such as T-Mobile runs the HSPA network whilst MetroPCS uses CDMA, and as MetroPCS is a regional carrier with only enough spectrum to cover part of the USA, it probably wouldn’t add much to T-Mobile.
T-Mobile USA, the fourth largest carrier in the US behind Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, lost some 510,000 contact customers in the last quarter, although new prepaid customers helped boost T-Mobile’s total customer base at the end of March to 33.4 million.
So what do our readers thing of this possible merger between T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS, would you like to see it become a reality or do you think it is purely rumour and will never happen?