Rumor of T-Mobile USA Looking for a Partner Persists – But Who?

What do you do when you are in a distant 4th place in the U.S. wireless carrier race? Electronista reports…

T-Mobile looking to team up with other US carrier?

The idea of T-Mobile’s parent company (telecom giant Deutsche Telekom) buying Sprint came up a few months ago. I don’t know how people could have taken that rumor seriously. T-Mobile uses GSM for voice (like AT&T) while Sprint uses CDMA (like Verizon). Sprint still can’t figure out how to get the oddball Nextel network integrated into their network. What chance would their be of combining T-Mobile and Sprint?

T-Mobile merged with Orange (owned by France Telecom) in the UK. But, who is there in the US for T-Mobile to partner with? AT&T? Probably not. Electronista suggests MetroPCS. But, MetroPCS is CDMA based too. And, while it is #5, it only has 6.3 million U.S. customers. T-Mobile USA has about 34 million US customers. Is an 18.5% customer bump significant? Probably not.

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