T-Mobile LTE service coming to USA in 2013, but customers leaving now

Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s parent company that until recently was trying to shed its US operations in a deal with AT&T, has announced plans to deliver LTE connectivity to its subscribers at some point next year. LTE has rapidly become the de facto next-generation standard for mobile broadband and the other three major US carriers are already at varying stages of rolling out their service, with Sprint, the slowest of the trio, promising to have a number of cities active by mid-2012. T-Mobile’s going to be playing catchup by exploiting the new spectrum it gained from the breakup fee relating to the failed AT&T takeover and by investing a further $1.4 billion of its own.

While it’s encouraging to see DT putting some money toward shoring up T-Mobile’s loss of subscribers, the past quarter was actually a pretty torrid time for the US carrier: it lost some 802,000 contract customers in Q4 2011. Philipp Humm, the company’s CEO and President, pins the blame squarely on the iPhone: “not carrying the iPhone led to a significant increase in contract deactivations in the fourth quarter of 2011.”