5 Facts About MetroPCS

Today, T-Mobile USA announced plans to merge with MetroPCS, a deal that could lead to serious job losses. Here are five things you need to know about MetroPCS

1. MetroPCS has “outsourced all of its customer contact center services to maintain low operating expenses” through a partnership with Telvista, a call center outsourcer. Good American jobs are now going to Mexico, Antigua, Panama, and the Philippines, according to the company’s 10-K filing.
2. MetroPCS only employs 3,700 workers for a whopping 9.3 million customers. No wonder MetroPCS contracts out most of its work. This is clearly not a company that wants to grow its workforce, nor is it a company that cares about workers’ rights on the job.
3. Despite complaints that its "Tech and Talk with Ranjit and Chad" campaign was extremely offensive to the Indian community, the company continued to air the racist ads.
4. Customers will bear the brunt of the cost of this merger. TechHive writes, “MetroPCS's 3G network uses CDMA, a different technology from T-Mobile's GSM-based system. This means phones owned by MetroPCS customers will not work on T-Mobile’s network. As a result, these customers will be forced to upgrade their phones, and that’s a potentially expensive proposition considering the way MetroPCS does business.”
5. GigaOm writes, “Merging a regional CDMA operator with a national GSM carrier would be a disaster on the highest order and T-Mobile would gain little from the transaction – certainly not enough to offset the enormous hell it would have to endure to try to integrate the two operators completely incompatible network technologies. You thought Sprint Nextel was a mistake? T-Mobile-MetroPCS would make that deal look like the royal wedding.”