T-Mobile, MetroPCS Merger Approved By FCC: What It Means To Customers

Sometime in the second quarter of this year, national telecommunications providers T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS will likely merge --- meaning, if you've been following T-Mobile's latest ad campaign, a lot more office buildings around the country will be turning hot pink.

To be exatct, combining the two networks will leave a single carrier with 42.3 million subscribers.

Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission approved T-Mobile's bid to acquire MetroPCS.

But the MetroPCS board still needs to ratify the plan, while the U.S. Department of Justice needs to offer its two cents.

A potential hang-up to the deal is a counter bid for MetroPCS from Sprint.

Nonetheless, assuming the deal does, in fact, go through, here are a few things customers of the new T-Metro, or Mobile-Metro, or T-PCS, or Mobile-PCS can expect, according to a posting at theverge.com:

MetroPCS subscribers are in for the biggest changes because the networks and devices they use will simply cease to function in a two-to-three year period. By the end of 2015, it's planned the new company will remove all traces of Metro-PCS's CDMA and LTE infrastructure from the grid, and it plans to replace every CDMA phone with a new HSPA device.

Neville Ray of T-Mobile promised the transition will be as seamless and painless as possible, with former Metro-CS customers using their current CDMA phones up to 2015.

There will be a lag between when the merger is finalized and when the new company's unified network is deployed, expected, if all goes as planned, in the latter half of 2013 and in 2014. But once those new 4G systems are up, the new handsets provides former MetroPCS customers will include LTE radios.

At that point, MetroPCS customers with CDMA-LTE phones should also experience a big boost in both 4G speeds and coverage. MetroPCS customers will get a firmware update on their handsets that allow them to access the new company's LTE network. That means they will eventually see 4G connections nationwide, instead of merely in the former MetroPCS's 14-city footprint. MetroPCS customers will start seeing speed increases up to four times what they experience today.

A casualty of the merger may be Metro's voice-over-LTE service. Ray said the new company would support the mobile VoIP service until the last MetroPCS handsets are switched off, but then the new company will decide whether or not to continue MetroPCS's aggressive VoLTE plans.

Within two years, however, the new company is expected to launch its own unified VoLTE platform available to all of its customers.

And, for most T-Mobile subscribers....the merger will pretty much mean business as usual.

They'll keep the same handsets, voice and data plans and coverage.

However, it's likely the new company will maintain the prepaid contract-free unlimited data plan options that are MetroPCS's specialty.

Right now T-Mobile offers unlimited data levels for contract customers, but all of its prepaid plans have soft caps --- in other words, if one uses more than their monthly allotment of data, connections are dropped down to 2G speed.

Also, T-Mobile customers who happen to live in a former MetroPCS market will eventually get access that to a big fat 4G pipe. Combining the two carriers' 1700 MHz/2100 MHz Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) airwaves will allow the new company to deploy an LTE network with as much as 40 MHz of capacity in 10 of the largest markets in America, including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston and San Francisco.

Verizon and AT&T currently use 20 MHz of spectrum for their LTE networks.