LAS VEGAS—T-Mobile is back, and it's better than ever. The wireless carrier's "break-up fee" with AT&T will help it boost the speed and power of its network, and there might even be an iPhone on the horizon. I talked to T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray, and he was all smiles.
"We're back. We believe we can offer a combination of a great network, great devices, and great value to the U.S. consumer," he said.
T-Mobile's deal with AT&T has three benefits. There's $3 billion in cash, which Ray didn't want to talk about. There's AWS spectrum in various markets nationwide, which matches up well with T-Mobile's existing spectrum. There's also a 3G roaming agreement with AT&T, although Ray cautioned that the roaming agreement hasn't been fully hammered out and won't be nationwide. Most likely, it'll just improve T-Mobile's rural coverage somewhat.
The new spectrum "is a nice catalyst for us to review our spectrum and technology strategies," Ray said. Going to LTE, as most other carriers are doing, isn't an immediately obvious move for T-Mobile because the carrier is in the middle of a transition to HSPA+ 84. That's a backwards-compatible, super-3G technology which offers the same speeds you'd get on some forms of LTE.
"The network will be ready somewhere during the first half of the year, and we're working on the device front. Something may happen in '12, and certainly '13 on 84," Ray said.
So LTE only makes sense for T-Mobile if the carrier has deep enough spectrum to really make it count.
"To drive a differentiation between what we can do with HSPA+ and LTE, we've said that should be a 2-by-10(Mhz) deployment. "We've always looked at thin deployments of LTE and said they're marginal at best, and it's better to run with the HSPA+ we have on the ground."
iPhone Coming to T-Mobile?
Meanwhile, two new moves make it more likely that T-Mobile will host the iPhone 5. Previous iPhones couldn't come to T-Mobile because Apple would have had to build a special model to support the carrier's AWS 3G network, Ray said.
But "the AWS banding barrier should be removed in the next version," which means "the capability will be there, and it's [Apple's] call whether they light that up in terms of a commercial decision," Ray said.
T-Mobile is also moving to "refarm" its 1900Mhz spectrum from 2G to 3G, and that's a band the iPhone already supports. Unlocked iPhone users in some parts of the U.S. have already seen T-Mobile 3G pop up on their phones. More than just with the iPhone, though, refarming 1900 gives T-Mobile a much broader range of devices to choose from.
"A 1900 [3G] network certainly aligns us more with HSPA+ device roaming and compatibility with AT&T," Ray said.
After all, just because T-Mobile isn't being absorbed by AT&T doesn't mean they can't work together.