AT&T’s $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile might have you hopeful that the iPhone will be coming to T-Mobile customers soon. T-Mobile themselves want to set you right on the matter, though:
T-Mobile USA remains an independent company. The acquisition is expected to be completed in approximately 12 months. We do not offer the iPhone. We offer cutting edge devices like the Samsung Galaxy S 4G and coming soon our new Sidekick 4G.
In other words, don’t expect T-Mobile to get the iPhone until at least 2012, and even then, T-Mobile stores won’t suddenly become AT&T stores: T-Mobile will work as an independent company within AT&T, and have their own handsets. If the iPhone comes to T-Mobile, it won’t just roll out automatically to customers by dint of AT&T being the parent company.
On an ancillary note, check out this quote on the rationale of T-Mobile’s decision to be acquired by AT&T:
Bringing together these two world-class businesses will create significant benefits for customers. The merger will ensure the deployment of a robust 4G LTE network to 95% of the U.S. population, something neither company would achieve on its own.
This is interesting. It’s T-Mobile and AT&T admitting that their current “4G” offerings are nothing of the sort. While both T-Mobile and AT&T are calling their HSPA+ service “4G” when it’s really just faster 3G, and far inferior to the likes of Sprint’s WiMax or Verizon’s LTE. In fact, AT&T’s 4G smartphones are actually slower at data transfer than the iPhone 4, which is a decidedly 3G handset!
T-Mobile and AT&T seem to both be admitting that unless they work together, they simply don’t have any hope of catching up with Verizon’s LTE deployment. Together, though, they can blanket most of the country in GSM LTE in a shorter period of time. If there’s any bright side to any of this, it’s that at least T-Mobile and AT&T will both stop lying to customers about what 4G means.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
8 responses to “T-Mobile: iPhone Isn’t Coming To Our Network Anytime Soon”
Something has gone wrong here. Title/picture/story mismatch.
@JohnBrownlee
Headline/graphic belong with the previous story about John Ives
You gotta learn to re-read your own stories after you post them to check for mistakes and typos. Soon they will be calling your postings Cult of Mistakes. I know.
Yeah, thanks for that, guys. It’s been fixed.
There is no such thing as “GSM LTE.”. That is kind of like saying “MS-DOS 10.7 Lion.” They are, for the most part, unrelated.
GSM referrs to a set of 2G voice and data technologies. That’s it. 2G. Not 3G.
Not 4G.
UMTS is the 3G technology that AT&T, T-Mobile, and most of the rest of the world is using. It includes various flavors of HSPA data transport technology. It is not compatible with GSM. If you open up an AT&T or T-Mobile cell site equipment enclosure, you’ll find separate racks for GSM and UMTS equipment. They have different base stations, radios, etc. iPhones sold for use on AT&T’s network, starting with the iPhone 3G, have been GSM/UMTS hybrid phones. The only true “GSM iPhone” was the original. If you are using an iPhone 3G or later AT&T’s network, and you see the little “3G” icon at the top of the screen, then you are using a UMTS network, not a GSM network.
LTE is another major technology change. It requires all-new equipment on the back-end, and is not compatible with either GSM or UMTS. It has an all-IP based network structure, and a very different air interface (OFDMA, vs. TDMA for GSM, or W-CDMA for UMTS).
I’m not sure why the lazy tech press continues to refer to AT&T and T-Mobile as “GSM carriers.” It’s like calling Apple a “USB 1.1 hardware vendor.”