T-Mobile subscribers who just got socked with rate increases on older plans may now have a better sense of where that money is going: The carrier is buying the retail-wireless business of regional carrier UScellular.
This roughly $4.4 billion deal will see T-Mobile pick up a 30% slice of UScellular’s spectrum holdings and its wireless customers—who will use T-Mobile’s network as regular customers instead of on a roaming basis. T-Mobile customers also gain full access to UScellular’s network.
A slide deck posted by UScellular with its own announcement provides a more detailed breakdown of the spectrum shuffle afoot. T-Mobile will get all of that carrier’s 600MHz, 2.5GHZ, and 24GHz spectrum and "the majority" of other UScellular low- and lower-midband holdings. What’s left of UScellular will retain C-band and some extra mid-band frequencies.
The midband frequencies—the heart of T-Mobile’s 5G proposition and a key to the success of its fixed-wireless home broadband—are the ones to watch there.
T-Mobile will also wind up with UScellular stores, while the rump of UScellular will keep its almost 4,400 cell towers and ink a new long-term lease of at least 2,015 of them to T-Mobile. This transaction, which both firms say should conclude in mid-2025, will see T-Mobile assume about $2 billion of the smaller company’s debt.
UScellular became the fourth biggest wireless carrier in the US after T-Mobile’s 2020 purchase of Sprint. But the Midwest-oriented company founded in 1983 as United States Cellular (and which for a while may have had its biggest nationwide exposure via naming rights to the Chicago White Sox’s ballpark), does not play in the same league as AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
Where T-Mobile reported first-quarter earnings of $2.4 billion in net income and 121 million customers, UScellular’s Q1 earnings led off with $18 million in net income and under 4.1 million retail customers—fewer than the 5.2 million subscribers T-Mobile cited just for its fixed-wireless service. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that T-Mobile and Verizon were discussing how to carve up UScellular.
In PCMag’s latest Readers’ Choice survey, T-Mobile was the highest-ranked carrier (although the network resellers Consumer Cellular, Google Fi, now-T-Mo-owned Mint Mobile, and Verizon’s Visible ranked higher still), while UScellular did not show up in our stats.
Neither did the current fourth-largest wireless carrier, Dish Wireless—now a few years into building a greenfield 5G network in a plan the DOJ greenlit as part of its approval of the T-Mobile-Sprint deal to position Dish to become a viable nationwide alternative to the big three. In early May, Dish’s parent firm EchoStar reported in its Q1 earnings that its wireless customer base shrank slightly to 7.3 million subscribers.