After AT&T made its plans to acquire T-Mobile official this Sunday in a $39 billion deal that will take 12 months to finalize, technical details start to emerge on how things will be rolled out and operating.
Turns out AT&T will add T-Mobile’s AWS (Advanced Wireless Services) spectrum of 1700MHz to its own 700MHz LTE frequency which together will facilitate the deployment of 4G LTE to 95 percent of the US population. T-Mobile is currently operating its 3G services on the 1700MHz band which is also called UMTS Band IV so the challenge to deploy 4G LTE on that specific frequency still stands.
On the other hand, 2G and 3G bands are to be combined which should improve both the performance and the capacity of the network. Hopefully it will also bring better coverage in areas like New York, Las Vegas and others facing signal issues. “T-Mobile subscribers gain improved coverage” says the slide and we hopefully don’t have to wait until 2012 for that to happen.
