T-Mobile has a GSM network and Sprint’s is CDMA. Most of the mobile mergers have been between carriers with the same network type, haven’t they? I don’t understand what T-Mobile gains by incorporating a customer base from an incompatible network. Would they maintain both systems as part of the merged company? If not, and they drop CDMA, can they reuse some of the infrastructure to improve their GSM network?
This doesn’t really matter a whole lot beyond people hanging on to their ancient flip phones, LTE is LTE. (MetroPCS was CDMA as well).
Legacy CDMA and GSM networks are slowly being starved of bandwidth in pretty much every mobile operator’s network, the spectrum being refarmed and added to more modern technologies. I’m not sure offhand what the timetable was for Sprint to sunset any 2G/3G stuff they still have out there, I think the T-Mobile timeframe was 2019-2020. It will probably take a year just to get all the regulatory approval for the merger, so by the time we start talking about any actual technical combinations, GSM/CDMA will be mostly history anyway.
That’s quite the exaggeration. The first iPhone to have LTE capability was the iPhone 5, so any phone older than an iPhone 5 would be limited to the kinds of signals that the two service providers are incompatible with. The iPhone 4 is fairly old now, but it’s far from an “ancient flip phone.”
And my iPhone 6 frequently has to fall back on 3G technology when there isn’t an LTE signal available.
Also, you mentioned GSM and CDMA, but the relevant technologies are WCDMA and CDMA2000, used by T-Mobile and Sprint, respectively.
What they gain is a much bigger customer base, so that in the end they’ll have about 100 million customers. More than AT&T but less than Verizon. And the argument I’m hearing is that the size will allow them to roll out a 5G network. Since that’s new, it may not matter much that their legacy networks are incompatible.
Yes, it was slightly facetious, but the iPhone 4 came out in 2010, the iPhone 5 in 2012. With mid-2019 being the likely earliest anything technical might happen, that means you’re looking at a 7-9 year old smartphone, which may as well be a flip phone.
Yes, they have a bigger customer base. They will build 5G. Then as anyone with an older phone discovers their service sucks, and “hey look, I can replace that phone for free and get better service” (radio service, to be clear); then within a few years they can turn off the old networks. My analog phone stopped working a long time ago. Sooner or later other old technologies will suffer the same fate. I’m sure they can do traffic analysis to determine which areas barely use CDMA etc. to tell them when to turn off service (and which customers to target to get there).
It’s about the customer base and the wireless spectrum, the infrastructure is largely irrelevant.
And of course it doesn’t really matter whether the phone is actually sufficiently old, what matters is what percentage of customers are still relying on the old network.
If it’s less than a few percent, then it’s likely better to just give the remaining customers a sweet deal on new hardware than keep the old network running.
Very few people keep their cell phones for 8 years.