Why T-Mobile wants Verizon’s discarded 4G airwaves

[Commentary] Why does T-Mobile want to build an LTE network using frequencies Verizon hasn’t touched in six years? There are several reasons, but the main one has to do with the different stages the two carriers are at in their LTE rollouts.

Verizon sold the low-frequency licenses because it no longer needed them. Verizon had already built out its coverage network to most of the U.S. population. It no longer needed range, it needed capacity, and those high-frequency AWS airwaves were the perfect vehicle for the high-bandwidth network it craved. Verizon traded in its beachfront property for what it considered penthouse real estate.

T-Mobile is in the opposite position. It’s in the process of building a very high-capacity LTE network in the big cities using AWS frequencies (networks just as powerful as Verizon’s). But the big knock on T-Mobile has always been that its impressive 3G and 4G speeds disappear once you leave the city limits. These low-frequency airwaves will let T-Mobile build wide-sweeping networks to fill in those gaps. The reason T-Mobile is acting now to buy those airwaves — apart from having recently raised funds for such acquisitions — is that the 700 MHz airwaves it’s buying recently became much more useful. T-Mobile is getting a portion of the band known as the A-block, which no other nationwide operator is using for LTE. Still T-Mobile remains in the market for more spectrum. The Verizon purchase only gives it 700 MHz licenses covering half the country’s population. If T-Mobile truly wants to shed its reputation as being a city-only service provider, it will have to buy a lot more airwaves.