T-Mobile to wind down Sprint consumer brand this summer

After finalizing a long and drawn-out merger process in April, T-Mobile this week said it plans to discontinue the Sprint brand in mid-summer as it unifies the two companies' enterprise and consumer segments.

Newly minted T-Mobile CEO Dan Sievert revealed the carrier's unification strategy at a recent investor event, saying an initial timeline to shutter Sprint's consumer arm was set for early summer, reports Fierce Wireless.

While the coronavirus outbreak disrupted T-Mobile's original plans, the company was "always planning" a summer timeframe for a fusing of assets.

"With COVID-19, we moved it out into the mid-summer instead of the early summer, and this is when we will essentially be advertising one flagship postpaid T-Mobile brand as well as operating a unified fleet of retail," Sievert said. "The retail piece is why we slowed down just a little bit."

Most Sprint users can already take advantage of T-Mobile's network. In April, T-Mobile said it would allow Sprint subscribers to roam on its LTE towers for free, effectively doubling the number of available cell sites for many customers. According to Sievert, more than 80% of Sprint's postpaid base have handsets compatible with T-Mobile's network.

Efforts toward brand unification under the T-Mobile banner are already under way for enterprise customers, the report said.

T-Mobile and Sprint cleared numerous regulatory hurdles to finalize a landmark merger in early April. The agreement nets T-Mobile access to Sprint cell towers and other capabilities as it moves to rapidly build out a nationwide 5G network. Verizon and AT&T, viewed as America's wireless duopoly, are transitioning their own equipment and spectrum to do the same.

When T-Mobile and Sprint merged, then-T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who for years acted as the face of the "Un-carrier," stepped down. He formally exited the company in late April to pursue other projects.

10 Comments

baconstang 1152 comments · 10 Years

About 4 years ago

I wonder what is going to happen to the pre-paid brands? I had Virgin Mobile for years. It recently got folded into Boost Mobile.

chasm 3584 comments · 10 Years

Sprint was a lousy company to be a customer of even before cell phones were dominant! One of my first cell phones (pre-iPhone) was one of theirs. The walk-in-talkie feature was novel but not especially useful to me (others found it more useful). Customer service was terrible.

mjtomlin 2690 comments · 20 Years

baconstang said:

I wonder what is going to happen to the pre-paid brands? I had Virgin Mobile for years. It recently got folded into Boost Mobile.

Same here... Boost is awful... just switched back to AT&T

GeorgeBMac 11421 comments · 8 Years

chasm said:

Sprint was a lousy company to be a customer of even before cell phones were dominant! One of my first cell phones (pre-iPhone) was one of theirs. The walk-in-talkie feature was novel but not especially useful to me (others found it more useful). Customer service was terrible.

My experience was quite the opposite: I was going through Sprint using a smart phone (a Samsung that also ran the Palm OS) back in the late 90's and later Palm Treo's and such until I got an iPhone 5 when I switched to AT&T. And, through almost all that time -- almost a decade -- I got excellent service from Sprint. It wasn't till the end when Sprint was starving for money that their customer oriented service began to fall off.

I am wondering which Apple phones running Sprint won't work on the T-Mobile network and how they'll be impacted.

The "locked" concept of cell phones has always been mired in muddy obfuscations: carriers would software lock phones to their network but, less talked about, was that not all modems would run on all networks. Carriers tended to sell phones that would only run on their type of network: CDMA or GSM -- and then there were sub-types of each.

Because of that, my practice has long been to never buy a phone direct from a carrier and always buy from Apple -- where they supplied a "Simless" phone that would run on any network.

But I have a friend who bought his phone from Sprint and has been running on their CDMA network -- and I'm wondering if it will be able to attach to T-Mobile's GSM network?