Copernicus said:
Uh....yeah that's not happening.
Yes it is. It really is.
Just look at the yawning technical canyon that now stands in between Verizon and AT&T-Mobile. Verizon has rolled out LTE successfully in 22 markets, with plans to overlay 75% of Americans with LTE coverage by 2013. AT&T-Mobile combined still have no strategy in place for LTE rollout nor enough spectrum to do it on a single band. Let's not mince any words here: AT&T paid $39 billion for T-Mobile because they were
desperate for more infrastructure and spectrum, because at this point they haven't even finished 3G overlay over their much tinier 3G footprint and now they have to chase after Verizon for LTE overlay, and they just lost the only thing that forced people to stay with AT&T all these years when iPhone went to Verizon.
The good news is that $39 billion is basically chump change in global telecom. Deutsche Telekom was pretty desperate to sell off their money-losing T-Mobile USA operations, as the infrastructure investment necessary to make the T-Mobile network competitive with Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T would have amounted to hundreds of billions and DT didn't want to keep losing money for another decade while also investing possible hundreds of billions of dollars to build out the network. AT&T got a lot of value for $39 billion, but now they have to deal with all their phones needing to support a minimum of 4 bands just for covering the US home markets, which will make testing new devices fun.
In general, T-Mobile only covered major US cities where AT&T already had infrastructure. So they won't increase the overall size of coverage. They'll get more capacity in cities though, and most importantly, they now have T-Mobile's extra spectrum for when they start rolling out LTE. Although God knows when that will be at this point. If you have any interest in LTE you should be switching to Verizon ASAP regardless. They've rolled it out, they have a plan in place, and by 2013 if you live anywhere near a major city you should be covered by Verizon LTE.