Pending the close of the $26 billion T-Mobile and Sprint merger, the company has now announced a plethora of new initiatives and its plans to use the deal to the benefit of those who arguably need it most. The initiative will serve the impoverished and first-responders if everything goes according to plan and the deal closes. That all starts, of course, with the finalization of plans for the new company to roll out its 5G network.
T-Mobile says that it will be able to roll out its 5G network “nationwide” as early as December 6. That puts its timeframe at the end of next year since the merger is expected to close in 2020. It’s already been approved by both the Justice Department and the FCC. Only the lawsuits, brought by several state attorneys general, remain.
That network would be the result of massive investments from the new company. In total, T-Mobile says it plans to spend $40 billion but that will allow it to increase capacity by 14 times compared to its current network.
It also would allow a much broader reach for the nationwide network. T-Mobile says it will cover more than 5,000 U.S. cities and towns, covering more than 200 million potential customers. That includes those in rural parts of the country.
What about those T-Mobile/Sprint merger initiatives?
By joining with Sprint, T-mobile also indicates that it will be enabled to launch at least three new primary initiatives to serve the public.
It’s dubbed the largest of those efforts the Connecting Heroes Initiative. Summarily, that’s a 10-year commitment to give public and non-profit first responders of every stripe access to 5G for free. The service would include unlimited talk, text, and smartphone data. The promise encompasses police, fire and EMS agencies too and includes every first responder across the country at the local and state levels.
Project 10Million is another massive initiative, seemingly pulled or inspired by Sprint’s 1Million Project. It is much larger than that other project though.
Effectively, T-Mobile plans to utilize the merger to completely eliminate the “homework gap” for millions of children in the country. It will essentially offer free service and hotspots as well as reduced cost-devices over a five year period. Those will be aimed at students who wouldn’t have access otherwise and the plan is to extend access to 10 million households.
At least part of that endeavor is at least partially covered in its final major initiative, enabled by the merger. Through T-Mobile connect, the carrier plans to undercut its competition with brand new prepaid plans starting at $15 per month. Those will start at 2GB per month of high-speed data. At $25 per month, that bumps to 5GB of data and every year loyal customers stick around will increase the allotment. Plans will give customers an additional 500MB per month every year for “the next five years.”
Secondary initiatives are part of the plan too, and always have been
There are a few other promises the company is including with its latest release as well. Those have already been stated in the past. But T-Mobile is reiterating them now that its Sprint merger is all but approved, showing a strong commitment to at least try and follow through on those plans.
Arguably, the biggest of those promises is that it will deliver approximately 11,000 new jobs by 2024. Those are jobs the company — and Sprint — would not have been able to add on its own. A portion of that will be tied into the opening of new stores as well as new customer care centers. New centers are planned to be built “near Fresno, Calif., Kansas City, KS, and Rochester, NY.”
All of those care centers and existing ones will also be switched over to the company’s Team of Experts approach. That summarily gives customers access to a full team of helpers when it’s needed. That team works around a customer’s schedule and becomes dedicated to solving the customer’s problem until its resolved.
Finally, the company is partnering with six civil rights organizations to built a set of diversity and inclusion initiatives.