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John Legere, T-Mobile's Brash "Un-Carrier" Chief, to Leave in May 2020

Accepted submission by martyb at 2019-11-19 20:34:10 from the the enemy of my enemy is my friend? dept.
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John Legere Leaving T-Mobile After 7 Fun Years of Bashing AT&T [arstechnica.com]:

T-Mobile CEO John Legere will leave the company's top job after his contract runs out on April 30, 2020, T-Mobile announced today [t-mobile.com]. Mike Sievert, T-Mobile's president and chief operating officer, will replace Legere as CEO on May 1.

Legere, who became CEO in September 2012, revived a struggling company and led the "Un-carrier" strategy that pitched T-Mobile as a customer-friendly alternative to the AT&T/Verizon duopoly. T-Mobile's Un-carrier moves [t-mobile.com] changed some of the punitive business practices [arstechnica.com] that mobile carriers routinely inflicted on customers.

But Legere's T-Mobile also helped lead the way [arstechnica.com] in making throttling of streaming video [arstechnica.com] a standard industry practice. [arstechnica.com] T-Mobile was punished by the federal government [arstechnica.com] in 2016 for failing to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its "unlimited data" plans, and like other carriers, it sold its customers' real-time location data [arstechnica.com] to third parties. Legere often offered better deals than competitors, but US wireless prices still rank among the most expensive in the world [rewheel.fi].

Legere used a brash and combative style to promote T-Mobile, often insulting larger rivals AT&T and Verizon by calling them "Dumb and Dumber." In 2017, he said [t-mobile.com] that T-Mobile's scientific research found that Verizon was the "Dumber" part of that pair. Legere will leave as T-Mobile attempts to complete its pending acquisition of Sprint, a deal that would reduce wireless competition in the US [arstechnica.com] and make T-Mobile roughly the same size as AT&T and Verizon.

Legere helped T-Mobile and Sprint win the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice's approval [arstechnica.com] of the merger, but the companies must still defeat a lawsuit [arstechnica.com] filed by a coalition of state attorneys general in order to complete the merger.

The Sprint/T-Mobile merger may reduce competition, but if Sprint instead declared bankruptcy, then wouldn't the larger AT&T and Verizon be likely to outbid T-Mobile for Sprint's spectrum licenses leaving T-Mobile even less able to compete?

Also at: c|net [cnet.com].


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