Business Bytes
Renee Oricchio

Guess Who's Buying T-Mobile

 

AT&T will soon be leapfrogging over Verizon to become the biggest wireless carrier in the United States after announcing today (Sunday) that it will be acquiring T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. T-Mobile is currently owned by Deutsche Telekom.

Once the deal goes through, AT&T will inherit T-Mobile's 33 million subscribers adding to its own wireless customer base of 95 million users. Verizon currently has 102 million wireless customers.

It will be awhile before T-mobile customers see any changes in their service, as it will take about that long for the merger to go through.

It comes as no surprise that Deutsche Telekom was looking to either sell or spin-off T-Mobile ever since last May when CEO Rene Obermann let it drop at the company's annual meeting that he was not happy with T-Mobile's performance.

Rumors have been circulating recently that Sprint was putting together a offer. No dice! AT&T beat them to the punch.

T-Mobile has already put up a posting addressing possible customer concerns about the merger. I'll cut to the chase for some of you.

No, T-Mobile is not getting the iPhone anytime soon.

 

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio