MetroPCS, T-Mobile Announce Cell Site Decommissioning Plans

November 19, 2012

The bad news that comes with the good news of every carrier merger, decommissioning cell sites, came up as representatives of MetroPCS Communications and T-Mobile USA discussed their strategy to combine their companies at the Morgan Stanley 12th Annual Technology, Media and Telecoms Conference on Nov. 15 in Barcelona.

Neville Ray, chief technology officer of T-Mobile, distanced himself from the “checkered history” of carriers trying to combine disparate technologies, saying that the two companies would not be integrating their GSM and CDMA networks but would come together using LTE as their common technology.

“We are both skating where the puck is going,” Ray said. “The merger transaction is not about integrating two networks. MetroPCS is migrating toward LTE and so is T-Mobile. We will migrate their customers over to our LTE/HSPA+ network as quickly as possible to take advantage of the synergies.”

Migrating the MetroPCS customers over to the T-Mobile network will be completed in two and a half years, he added. As a result, 10,000 of MetroPCS’ 12,500 macrocells will be decommissioned.

“Both companies have built out dense urban core networks. When you look at the overlap of the two networks, there is a lot of it,” Ray said. “That affords us to attack the site decommissioning so aggressively to increase the synergies between the two networks.” Along with keeping 1,500 macrocell sites, the new company will retain MetroPCS’s 6,000 DAS nodes in urban cores, because of their capacity, coverage and efficiency, he added.

J. Braxton Carter, MetroPCS chief financial officer, said the migration of the MetroPCS customers’ 4G LTE handsets over to the T-Mobile network could be achieved with no handset replacement.

“We are doing it leveraging existing T-Mobile and infrastructure, with no need to buy additional spectrum or invest in additional capacity,” Carter said. “4G LTE is a significant development for our company.”

Jim Alling, chief operating officer, T-Mobile, also to part in the panel.