Wireless

摘要

John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile US — the combined carrier that emerged from Tuesday’s combinationnof T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS — helped ring the opening bell at the New York Stock ExchangenWednesday to mark the combined carriers' first day trading on the exchange under the ticker TMUS. TMobilenUSA had not traded as a separate entity because it was a wholly-owned subsidiary of DeutschenTelekom, which owns 74 percent of the combined carrier. The carriers that now form T-Mobile US had ancombined 43 million subscribers at the end of Q1, with spectrum holdings that “provides a path to at leastn20X20 MHz of 4G LTE in approximately 90 percent of the top 25 metro areas in 2014 and beyond,” T-Mobile US said. It said the combined T-Mobile US is headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., and will maintainna “significant presence” in Richardson, Texas, where MetroPCS had been based. Standard and Poor’snsaid it believes the combined carrier’s operations are at “good scale but still well behind” No. 1 U.S. carriernVerizon Wireless and No. 2 AT&T, and to a “lesser extent" No. 3 Sprint Nextel. The combined carriers'nsubscriber base is comprised of 50 percent contract customers, 34 percent no-contract customers andn16 percent wholesale, S&P said. The carrier will continue to “remain disadvantaged” against the largerncarriers in competing for the most data-intensive customers and will have a comparatively larger rate ofncustomer turnover, S&P said. T-Mobile US stock closed up 6.2 percent Wednesday at $16.52.