In an announcement shared on Friday, the Magenta cellular provider T-Mobile said that its acquisition of UScellular was officially complete for the pretty sum of $4.3 billion.
T-Mobile first announced its plans to acquire UScellular back in May of last year, following an ongoing trend of buying up several other United States-based cellular service companies, including MetroPCS and Sprint, to beef up its own cellular network.
T-Mobile’s initial interest in UScellular was to expand the carrier’s wireless spectrum rights and enable the company to deploy better service in rural America without having deploy an entirely new cellular infrastructure.
Whether you’re an existing T-Mobile customer or UScellular customer, this will impact you with improved service. T-Mobile subscribers will soon be able to connect to UScellular data towers in places where T-Mobile’s own service may have been lacking. Moreover, UScellular subscribers will gain access to T-Mobile’s network coverage, T-Satellite, and 5G Home Internet services.
While UScellular subscribers won’t see any billing changes immediately, that could change in the future as T-Mobile will want to push those subscribers onto its own plans. It will entice a lot of people with the freebies that it has long offered, such as Netflix, Apple TV+, and MLB.TV, among other things.
T-Mobile has promised a seamless transition for T-Mobile and UScellular subscribers alike, so it will be interesting to see how this improves the experience for those on either side of the coin.
It’s worth noting that as T-Mobile acquires an increasing number of cellular providers in the United States, it reduces user choice and consolidates cellular data options. It’s surprising that regulators continue to allow this frequent of mergers, considering how this can impact competition and prices.