As the shutdown date looms for MetroPCS’s CDMA network, 300,000 MetroPCS subscribers are still on the prepaid carrier’s legacy network.
Speaking Thursday at a MoffettNathanson conference, T-Mobile executives said that most MetroPCS markets have already been shuttered and that only the largest markets like New York City, Miami and Dallas remain.
It’s unclear if T-Mobile is planning any further promotional efforts in order to speed the migration of the remaining MetroPCS customers before the prepaid carrier’s network goes dark at the end of June. But if those holdouts move on to different service providers, it would negatively impact the positive trajectory with prepaid churn that T-Mobile has been recording.
T-Mobile CFO Braxton Carter said MetroPCS’s record low churn levels have helped grow the prepaid subscriber base. He said that at the time of the merger two years ago, there were nine million MetroPCS subscribers and that it’s now at 11 million.
Carter and T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray confirmed that since the merger, MetroPCS’s coverage area has increased from 104 million POPs to 200 million POPs.
As T-Mobile moves toward completing its MetroPCS integration, Carter predicted an excess of $1.5 billion run rate synergies into 2016 and added that it will translate to significant levered operating free cash flow.
Ray said that the MetroPCS spectrum that has already been or soon will be refarmed has propelled growth for T-Mobile’s wideband LTE coverage. T-Mobile expects to cover 200 markets with 30 MHz or 40 MHz wideband LTE by the end of 2015.
Read more: LTE-Advanced: Carrier Aggregation
Additional wideband LTE coverage comes at the same time T-Mobile is focused on expanding its nationwide footprint. Ray said T-Mobile is at 280 million nationwide POPs today and is looking to achieve coverage parity with AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the near future.
T-Mobile has indicated it will add around 1.6 million square miles of wireless coverage in the United States and the carrier is doing so by overlaying LTE on previously GSM-only coverage spots and continuing to deploy on its 700 MHz A Block spectrum.
Looking ahead, T-Mobile is preparing for the 600 MHz auction. Ray said the carrier ideally wants a 10×10 MHz footprint out of the auction but in the meantime he sounds confident keep up its network and customer growth and that that will eventually translate to EBITDA margin growth.
“My head is not around sustainability but how much more damage we can do to our competitors,” Ray said.
