After a nearly two-year struggle that had all the ingredients of a legal and regulatory soap opera, T-Mobile finally announced the completion of its costly, highly publicized, and incredibly consequential Sprint combination on April 1.

The current speed goals are not feasible

When the CPUC cleared the T-Mobile/Sprint merger back in April, its number one expectation was that the combined 5G network would enable access to speeds of at least 100 Mbps for 99 percent of the “Golden State’s” population by the end of 2026 and 300+ Mbps for 93 percent of Californians by the end of 2024. 

Instead, the “Un-carrier” is seeking an extension to 2026 for the 300 Mbps 5G objective, arguing that the CPUC mistakenly set the 2024 cutoff by relying on dates used by T-Mobile at the beginning of the regulatory approval process.

In other words, the 2024 5G goal would have been feasible if the merger had closed in 2018, which was obviously not the case and actually seems to make perfectly good sense. It remains to be seen if the CPUC will agree with the validity of New T-Mobile’s six-year build-out network model, especially when also taking into consideration the issue of the methodology set to be used to confirm these obligations.

While the mobile network operator wants all measurements to be based on FCC drive tests, California’s main regulatory agency is pushing for a new testing methodology, which would “inevitably result in regulatory uncertainty and potentially inconsistent” results that will then raise “federal preemption concerns”, causing “unnecessary” problems and controversies.

Job gains? Forget about it!

Under the conditions of the April 16 approval, the tally of combined jobs in California was supposed to eventually jump “by at least 1,000” compared to the total number of current T-Mobile and Sprint employees. But T-Mo appears to have suddenly realized this particular requirement is “well outside the Commission’s jurisdiction and established policy goals.”

As such, it looks like the best Californians can hope for is the current number of jobs to stay the same for the foreseeable future, which is actually what T-Mobile and Sprint voluntarily committed to right off the bat. 

Magenta highlights that adding as many full-time positions as the CPUC wants would also be “particularly burdensome and unjustified in light of the current COVID-19 crisis”, which again sounds fair but seems unlikely to resonate with the notoriously stringent state commission.