T-Mobile Provides More Data to FCC on UScellular Deal
T-Mobile provided additional answers to the FCC in response to questions posed in December about the carrier's buy of wireless assets from UScellular (see 2412270031). The companies announced in May an agreement where T-Mobile would purchase “substantially all” of the smaller carrier’s wireless operations, including some of its spectrum, in a deal valued at about $4.4 billion, including $2 billion in assumed debt (see 2405280047).
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Many of T-Mobile's answers, posted Tuesday in docket 24-286, were redacted, but not those about postpaid plan pricing. “T-Mobile makes pricing decisions for its consumer postpaid plans at a national level and sells postpaid mobile wireless services to customers in all states except Alaska,” the response said. “Its implementation of pricing decisions has varied only in rare circumstances for certain legacy rate plans in connection with legally binding regulatory commitments to certain states.”
Limitations on its ability “to implement national pricing policy are difficult to accommodate for technical and customer care-related reasons, and T-Mobile prefers to maintain national rate plans and intends to harmonize pricing on affected plans nationwide when practicable,” the carrier said. T-Mobile’s promotions include “paying termination fees from the customer’s previous carrier, paying for customers to get out of existing financing agreements on devices, subsidizing device purchases, and other porting incentives.” In recent years, device subsidies “have become an important locus of competition between T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, with each carrier regularly offering these subsidies to attract subscribers.”
T-Mobile also discussed its multiple prepaid offerings under different brands: T-Mobile, Metro by T-Mobile, Connect by T-Mobile, Ultra Mobile, Mint Mobile and Assurance Wireless. “Pricing for T-Mobile’s consumer prepaid plans is evaluated similarly to its postpaid plans -- the same interests, including cost position, customer perception and behavior, and network utilization rates, are used for pricing and discounting T-Mobile’s prepaid plans.”
T-Mobile redacted information on the number of cellsites it plans to add following consummation of the buy. But the response noted that about 90% “of the more than 2,000 cellular sites T‑Mobile plans to lease from UScellular after close are located in rural portions of the UScellular footprint.”