T-mobile, Wireless Carrier | featured news

T-Mobile will start offering the iPhone 5 on April 12. The company is currently the only major U.S. carrier not to offer Apple's popular smartphone.

T-Mobile USA, the struggling No. 4 cellphone company, is ditching plans centered on familiar two-year contracts in favor of selling phones on installment plans.

T-Mobile and MetroPCS have agreed to combine their struggling cellphone businesses in a deal aimed at letting them compete better with their three larger rivals. The combined company will use the T-Mobile brand and have 42.5 million subscribers.

T-Mobile USA agreed to sell the rights to about 7,200 of its towers to Crown Castle International for $2.4 billion in cash.

T-Mobile USA, the only "Big 4" phone company that doesn't sell the iPhone, now wants to snag used ones from AT&T. Starting Wednesday, when Apple is expected to reveal a new iPhone model, T-Mobile will start advertising that AT&T iPhone owners who are out of contract can switch to T-Mobile.

T-Mobile has pulled off a mobile industry first: it has reinstated the unlimited data plan after a year’s hiatus, showing that there may be a plausible business case after all for unfettered access to the mobile internet. Starting Sept. 5, it will begin offering an unlimited option to its smartphone plans.

U.S. consumers have had their fill of expensive, contract-based phone plans. Figures from T-Mobile USA on Thursday, added to earlier reports from other companies, indicate that the U.S. wireless industry lost subscribers from contract-based plans for the first time in the first quarter. Contract-based plans are the most lucrative ones for phone companies. The industry default over the past several decades, they account for the vast majority of revenue at the big phone companies.

T-Mobile USA said it would spend $4 billion on its wireless network to offer the high-speed fourth-generation mobile broadband service known as LTE.

T-Mobile USA, which just had its acquisition by AT&T blocked by regulators, is now urging the federal government to block another deal in the wireless world: Verizon's planned purchase spectrum from cable companies for $3.6 billion.

AT&T acknowledged that it could not overcome opposition from the Obama administration to creating the nation’s biggest cellphone service provider. The company said in a statement that it would continue to invest in wireless spectrum, but could not overcome resistance from both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. It added that American wireless customers “will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled” by the regulators’ decisions.