One Year into the Future of Wireless!
By Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile
This week marks the one-year anniversary of our official close to the T-Mobile and Sprint merger — two sets of amazing employees, the best leadership team in the industry, and an unmatched set of network assets and resources that have come together to create a Supercharged Un-carrier.
Over this past year, despite an unprecedented set of external circumstances, we’ve been all systems go. In fact, 2020 was our best year ever as a company, as we recorded a record 102 million customers and overtook AT&T to become America’s #2 wireless provider! But this merger was always about more than just financial and subscriber results. Much more. It was about a promise of 5G FOR ALL and taking on the competition like never before.
Combining our companies gave us even more fuel to take that Un-carrier spirit to new heights … and to more boldly challenge the status quo — fighting harder than ever to eliminate customer pain points. This merger made us bigger and gave us the opportunity to be better for our customers — and we’ve seized it.
A Year of Progress Builds a Foundation for What’s to Come
Just a few of my favorite examples of our progress include Connecting Heroes, our free service for first-responder agencies that can save them up to $7 billion over the next decade. Or services like Scam Shield that protect our customers from the billions of scams and robocalls they get every year. And maybe the best one yet, Magenta Max, the first plan that truly unleashes the capacity and speed of our 5G network to ensure customers will never be slowed down based on how much data they use.
We also said that we would expand access to underserved communities, and we are. Before the merger, T-Mobile committed to providing network coverage for 90% of rural Americans in the next few years, and we’re well on our way to achieving that goal. Through network coverage and a growing retail fleet of 15,000 branded stores, we’re starting to bring more choices and access to small towns and rural markets than ever before.
We also launched our $10.7 billion Project 10Million initiative during a time when connectivity has been more important than ever. To date, we’ve helped bridge the digital divide for more than 2.5 million underserved students nationwide with free or highly subsidized connectivity, and we are just getting started. Top that off with our five-year Equity in Action plan, fueled by a $25 million investment over the next five years, and I’m immensely proud of our dedication to diversity, equity and inclusion across this entire business. We all still have work to do, but we are helping to create opportunities for underserved and underrepresented communities every single day.
