AT&T’s attempt to buy T-Mobile USA last year ended in failure which resulted in AT&T giving T-Mobile money along with spectrum as a “breakup” fee. Well now it seems that T-Mobile might be making use of that extra money by becoming an acquirer themselves, and who do you think they have in their sights? Assuming the rumors are to believed, it has been reported that T-Mobile and regional carrier MetroPCS are currently in talks about a possible acquisition.
There has long been talks of T-Mobile USA’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom, about selling the carrier off or merging and it seems that merging T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS is one such possibility. Naturally both companies declined to comment about the rumor, and while an acquisition of MetroPCS would no doubt add on to T-Mobile’s customer base, there are several hurdles that both the carriers will have to work out as well.
For starters T-Mobile runs on an HSPA network while MetroPCS relies on CDMA. MetroPCS also has some form of LTE coverage while T-Mobile is only planning on rolling it out next year, and considering that MetroPCS is a regional carrier, they only have enough spectrum to cover a part of the country which does not look like it will help T-Mobile out very much. So based on that, is such a deal really in the works? For now we suggest taking it with a grain of salt until more concrete evidence has been uncovered.