As a part of AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile, the carrier announced that they'd be able to deploy LTE to an additional 46.5 million users. ATT revealed today that in order to aid in their expanded LTE roll out, they'll be supplementing their 700MHz LTE coverage by using T-Mo's 1700MHz AWS spectrum to also distribute LTE. ATT has said that when it repurposes T-Mo's 3G towers to push out a 4G signal instead, owners of T-Mobile 3G devices won't be getting a 3G signal anymore. That means that owners of 3G T-Mobile devices will need a new handset to keep the high-speed data juices flowing.
Even though we're still pretty far off from this happening, it's still kind of a bummer for folks that currently own a T-Mobile 3G handset. AT&T has said that they've factored the cost of replacement phones into their deal with T-Mo, but there's no word on exactly what kinds of choices that affected customers will be given. Stay tuned.
