
T-Mobile's numbers last year were nothing short of phenomenal. Not only did they crush records for customer growth in multiple market metrics, but they also really put the "fear" into AT&T and maybe Verizon a little bit too. Here's a quote with more detailed statistics:
To be exact, it added 8.3 million new customers over the year, including a million "postpaid," clients in the last quarter of 2014. The Uncarrier chalked that success up to its tweaked Simple Choice plans, saying that 89 percent of all postpaid customers are now on them. It also added 1.2 million prepaid clients over the year, all of which resulted in 19 percent more revenue and a net profit of $5.6 billion in 2014.
Despite T-Mobile's fantastic competitive results, John Legere recently complained about the state of Spectrum in the industry in the US. In fact, he lambasted the FCC's rules for creating an imbalance that could end T-Mobile's winning streak. Legere's issue is the way that the FCC offers spectrum to the highest bidder without regard to making it available to smaller competitors who can't afford the massive prices. This basically leads to a "poker-style" scenario, where the player with the most chips can control the table, only in the wireless mobile world, there's no way for any of the smaller players to get lucky and "win the pot" in order to compete effectively against the big dogs.
Here's another quote which shares Legere's complaint in more detail,
That prompted Legere to blast the FCC's rules, saying that a large chunk of spectrum should be reserved for smaller carriers in the next auction. Specifically, he said that half of it should be made available to competitors of AT&T and Verizon, since they already control 73 percent of low-band spectrum. He added that the auction should happen as soon as possible to prevent the two giants from building up a war chest. Despite that, T-Mobile purchased $2.5 billion worth of 700Mhz LTE spectrum from Verizon last year, and plans to "rapidly" deploy it by year's end.
What do you guys think of his perspective?
Source: Engadget