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As T-Mobile enters 2025, it's working to acquire and assimilate UScellular (Project Odyssey) and then, after that, to seek out additional revenue opportunities (Horizon 3).
T-Mobile scored high marks for its better-than-expected fourth quarter performance and 2025 outlook. And now the company's management is looking to what's next.
First up for the company is closing its proposed $4.4 billion acquisition of large parts of UScellular, a regional US wireless operator with around 5 million customers. That effort appears to fall under the title of "Project Odyssey," at least in T-Mobile's internal nomenclature. Company officials didn't immediately respond to questions on the topic.
Regardless, one of T-Mobile's early filings with the FCC on the proposed acquisition cited a "Project Odyssey: Valuation and Synergies Update" document that contained part of the due diligence it conducted on UScellular. That document, which does not appear to be publicly available, is dated January 24, 2024. T-Mobile announced its proposed acquisition of UScellular on May 28, 2024.
In the high-stakes world of corporate M&A, due diligence is the deep-dive, no-stone-unturned process where companies scrutinize every financial, operational and legal detail before sealing the deal, ensuring they're not buying into a telecom nightmare.
The integration
T-Mobile again cites "Project Odyssey" in a recent FCC filing describing how it will integrate UScellular's network into its own.
The operator wrote that it already supports UScellular's spectrum holdings – 600MHz, 700MHz A Block, PCS, AWS, 2.5GHz and 24GHz – with the radios it has already deployed. "That means that the radio transceivers and antennas that are used in T-Mobile's RAN [radio access network] are already configured to support the acquired UScellular spectrum. All that is required to deploy the UScellular spectrum on existing T-Mobile towers is the reconfiguration of the site channel usage by T-Mobile's network engineers, which can be done remotely without the need to visit the sites," the operator said.
Interestingly, T-Mobile also said it will use Multi-Operator Core Network (MOCN) and Reverse MOCN (RMOCN) technology "to permit UScellular subscribers to utilize T-Mobile's network as a 'home' network (and vice-versa)."
T-Mobile explained that that technology will allow it to migrate UScellular customers onto its own network without disrupting their services. It's the same technology that T-Mobile used to migrate Sprint customers onto its network after acquiring that company in 2020.
"We learned a lot from the very successful integration with Sprint," T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik said recently during his company's recent quarterly conference call, explaining that T-Mobile would employ the same strategies with UScellular.
However, T-Mobile's proposed acquisition of UScellular still requires regulatory approval. And just this week a group of consumer advocates – including Public Knowledge and the Open Technology Institute at New America – urged the FCC to reject the merger.
"It will result in the loss of the fifth largest marketplace competitor, make it nearly impossible for a fourth competitor to emerge in the market, and harm competition in labor markets," they told the FCC.
Horizon 3
Project Odyssey isn't the only item on T-Mobile to-do list. According to the financial analysts at Evercore, Horizon 3 is the codename for the operator's next big strategic push.
In a note to investors, the Evercore analysts wrote that the recent appointment of Srinivasan (Srini) Gopalan as T-Mobile's COO would allow the company's CEO, Mike Sievert, to pursue Horizon 3 objectives.
"What's perhaps becoming more intriguing is management's evolving vision around what it has dubbed 'Horizon 3' opportunities. Details are scarce, but CEO Mike Sievert expects to dedicate more focus in this area as the company returns to having a COO role with the recent appointment of Srini Gopalan," the analysts wrote.
And what exactly might be considered under Horizon 3? "We expect to hear more on how T-Mobile will look to leverage its capabilities around data and network to create new services supported by its leading brand, physical distribution and growing digital distribution capabilities (e.g., AI, the Vistar Media acquisition)," the Evercore analysts wrote.
T-Mobile officials have hinted in the past about selling AI services as well as building a multibillion-dollar ad-tech business through acquisitions like Vistar.
"While the telecom industry has spent the last five years or so going in the opposite direction and instead simplifying towards pureplay mobility and away from various 'adjacencies' like media or advertising, [T-Mobile] management has built a lot of goodwill with investors towards its disciplined capital allocation approach and has a meaningful benefit of the doubt as it explores new opportunities," concluded the Evercore analyst.
Indeed, both Verizon and AT&T have shed their media and advertising businesses in recent years. T-Mobile, meanwhile, has spent the past few years building a historic market capitalization on the back of a 5G network built via its $26 billion acquisition of Sprint.
What's next on T-Mobile's agenda, though, is anyone's guess. The company's management has expressed interest in everything from banking to fiber to advertising.
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