The merger of Sprint and T-Mobile will result in the formation of the second largest carrier in the United States in terms of total subscribers and revenue, according to the research firm S&P. Based on the data obtained by S&P in the previous year, the combined company, dubbed as the New T-Mobile, will likely have a 31-percent share of subscribers in the United States. In comparison, AT&T had a 34-percent share of subscribers in the country in the previous year while Verizon Wireless had a 28percent share of customers last year. The research firm also highlighted that after the merger, New T-Mobile will have the largest share of prepaid customers in the United States. The combined company is expected to have a 54-percent share of prepaid subscribers in the country after the merger is finalized. In comparison, the other national network operators, AT&T and Verizon, had a 28-percent and a 10-percent share of prepaid customers in the previous year respectively. However, New T-Mobile falls behind the other two carriers in terms of the postpaid market share. The combined company is expected to have a 24-percent share of postpaid subscribers in the United States, which is behind the 40-percent share of Verizon Wireless and the 28-percent share of AT&T in 2017. In addition, New T-Mobile is predicted to have 30-percent share of the total wireless revenue, which is larger than the 29-percent share of AT&T. However, it is still smaller than the 36-percent share of Verizon Wireless.
The research firm also noted that the tower companies will potentially be affected by the merger, since these firms will have to deal with several years of decommissioning after Sprint and T-Mobile merge. However, a report from late 2016 noted that the two major tower companies in the United States, Crown Castle and American Towers, will not be significantly affected by the decommissioning. The earlier report also mentioned that the negative impact caused by site decommissioning on the tower companies is expected to not exceed 8-percent.
When the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile was announced on April 29th, the two carriers claim that the merger will ultimately be beneficial to the public due to improved network coverage and data speeds, as well as the creation of thousands of jobs. In addition, the merger will allow the two companies to build a national 5G network through the 600MHz and 2.5GHz spectrum holdings of T-Mobile and Sprint. However, this merger will likely attract the scrutiny of the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice, since the merger will result in a significantly more concentrated wireless carrier industry in the United States, according to S&P.
