T-Mobile: Fewer Dropped Calls

By R. Alan Clanton, Thursday Review editor | Monday, January 6, 2014 |

Ever lost a call on your cell phone when you stepped into an elevator, travelled down a rural stretch of highway, or simply because you walked back toward the electronics department at Target? Well, Verizon and T-Mobile have come to a billion-dollar agreement to make your life of communicating a little easier, at least when it comes to your cell phone.

T-Mobile has agreed to pay Verizon a cool $2.4 billion (yes, that’s billions) for long-term spectrum access on Verizon’s enormous North American architecture. This will give T-Mobile greater reach into suburban and exurban places in a dozen major metropolitan areas—such as Dallas-Ft. Worth, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.—and improve call quality for many millions of existing T-Mobile customers.

The deal will also make T-Mobile, the fourth largest carrier of wireless service in the U.S., more competitive in wide areas around those major markets.

The arrangement means that Verizon will grant T-Mobile a wide swath of access to the low-bandwidth spectrum. In layman’s terms, this means that consumers with T-Mobile products in those markets affected will have fewer dropped calls, and clearer conversations in malls, suburban areas and office buildings.

In December, both companies had requested permission from the FCC to allow for a spectrum-swap, wherein the two cell phone giants could exchange access in hundreds of cell phone markets across the U.S. and improve service for millions of wireless customers. In this new deal, Verizon will simply sell some of its unused spectrum space (in the 700 megahertz frequency range) to T-Mobile, and the two companies would then make appropriate technical adjustments in each of the newly affected markets.

T-Mobile is an international company based in Bonn, Germany and owned by European communications giant Deutsche Telekom. T-Mobile has customers spread out across not only the U.S., but also the Virgin Islands, Canada, Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Verizon Wireless, based in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, is the largest provider of mobile phone service is North America, with approximately 120 million customers in the United States. Verizon was formed in 2000 as a result of the merger between GTE and Bell Atlantic.