T-Mobile's Ray: MetroPCS' DAS will give us a small cell play

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray

   Neville Ray

T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS (NYSE:PCS) expect to close their planned merger sometime in the first half of next year. The deal will combine MetroPCS' 9.3 million customers with T-Mobile's base of 33.2 million customers. In addition, if regulators approve it, the deal will also enable T-Mobile to merge MetroPCS' existing LTE network into its own planned LTE network on AWS frequencies and refarm MetroPCS' 1900 MHz CDMA spectrum for HSPA+ services. The combined company will have 76 MHz of total spectrum in the top 25 major metro areas. T-Mobile will also gain some new telecom infrastructure, including around 6,000 distributed antenna system (DAS) nodes that MetroPCS has deployed. FierceBroadbandWireless Editor Tammy Parker recently spoke with T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray regarding MetroPCS, DAS and spectrum. Hot Seat