T-Mobile MetroPCS merger tips LTE rollout on AWS

If you're thinking that T-Mobile will be grabbing one whole heck of a lot of LTE now that MetroPCS has joined the team, you'd be right – sort of. What the team has announced today is that should their merger work out, they'd be turning off MetroPCS's 1XCDMA network by the end of 2015 with sharing occurring between them and T-Mobile amounting to at least 50Mhz of wireless spectrum in key cities across the USA. With the spectrum they share, T-Mobile and MetroPCS would begin rolling out a "20x20" LTE network that'd be potentially twice as fast as Verizon's network.

We've yet to see how exactly this sort of speed would be possible given the fact that that'd be up to four times as fast as MetroPCS's own current LTE in most of the cities they're currently in. Cities included in the combined network of T-Mobile and MetroPCS would be New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco. This update would have MetroPCS getting rid of their 2G network, knocking its CDMA usage from 10Mhz down to 5Mhz and replacing that with LTE.

MetroPCS would replace the other 5Mhz CDMA block with HSPA+ then by 2015 – that's fast speeds all around the block, as it were. The talk given by T-Mobile and MetroPCS today outlined how they'd like to work with an LTE network based entirely on the AWS "Band 4" with their HSPA+ and GSM living in the PCS (1900Mhz) band. This would have GSM being the roaming band while AWS would keep their LTE devices speedy in the main cities covered by their service.

This merger will also make both companies into one larger group, but they'll remain the number 4 network in the country regardless, still not quite catching up with the top three as far as spectrum and subscribers go. Have a peek at our recent line of posts on this merger in the timeline below to learn more if you'd like – big things in the mobile universe here in the USA, that's for sure!