T-Mobile’s been steadily shutting down MetroPCS’s legacy CDMA network and repurposing that spectrum for GSM use for a while now, and today it’s been discovered when the final MetroPCS CDMA coverage will go down.
On a Network Upgrade support page on its site, MetroPCS says that customers must upgrade their phones that operate on the “legacy network” — aka the CDMA network — by June 21. Metro explains that after that date, it’ll be converting its legacy network to its new network, which uses GSM technology. Customers that don’t upgrade by June 21 “are not guaranteed to have service.”
Last month, T-Mobile said that around 80 percent of MetroPCS’s old CDMA network had been refarmed, but that there are approximately 500,000 MetroPCS customers still on that CDMA network. T-Mo’s been working on refarming Metro’s CDMA network for a while now, utilizing that spectrum to beef up its own GSM network, and so I’m sure that T-Mo is eager to wrap up that process to improve its coverage even further. Now we know that T-Mobile is aiming to finish that refarming process in around a month and a half, and so I’m sure that we’ll see T-Mobile and MetroPCS push hard to ger CDMA Metro customers onto a GSM phone in the coming weeks.
