Two months as T-Mobile US: Where it’s been, where it’s going

Exactly two months have passed since T-Mobile and MetroPCS officially merged, becoming the new T-Mobile US. 61 days out is as good a time as any to take at what the new T-Mobile has accomplished so far. Here’s what we know CEO John Legere and company have been working on:

• T-Mobile has started its migrating MetroPCS customers off of CDMA and onto its GSM networks. Last month, T-Mobile started selling three GSM smartphones to Metro customers in three cities and began inviting other customers to connect their unlocked GSM/HSPA+/LTE smartphones with Metro plans. Typically it can take years for an operator to fully merge to disparate network operations, but T-Mobile seems to moving as quickly as possible. The sooner those CDMA devices are gone, the sooner T-Mobile can shut down Metro’s networks and the sooner it can use that spectrum for LTE and HSPA+.
• T-Mobile may not have announced any more LTE markets since its original seven, but we know it’s been hard at work building out new markets. TMoNews has been tallying up LTE sightings in dozens of different markets, from San Francisco to New York. T-Mobile has said it plans to accelerate its rollout, covering a population of 100 million by midyear. Well it’s exactly midyear, so expect T-Mobile to announce a lot of new official LTE markets next week.
• MetroPCS may have brought in valuable new spectrum in key markets, but T-Mobile has been opportunistically poaching new airwaves wherever it can find them. Last week it announced a deal with U.S. Cellular to buy a big regional Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) license covering the Mississippi Valley. Those frequencies will add considerable heft to its mobile data networks in key cities like New Orleans, Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis and Nashville.
• T-Mobile isn’t just expanding its LTE footprint; it’s also pushing LTE’s technical capabilities. GigaOM has learned that T-Mobile will be among the first operators in the world to implement 4X2 MIMO smart antenna technology, which will increase overall uplink and downlink capacity and help devices maintain better signals when at the edge of a cell. T-Mobile is also weighing its first step toward LTE-Advanced through a technique called carrier aggregation, which could double device speeds in several of its markets. We could get a preview of both these technologies next week.