T-Mobile US facing a law suit on after effects of merger with Sprint

Thomas Babychan·June 26, 2022

T-Mobile US, Inc, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom (DT), a company based in Bonn, Germany, is on verge of facing a class action suit. T-Mobile US merged,

with another American telecom company named Sprint Corporation in 2020.

The merger deal was announced on April 29, 2018, and closed on April 1st 2020.

By April 21, 2020, T-Mobile started making changes regarding customers and networks from Sprint to T-Mobile. On July 2, 2020, T-Mobile officially announced it is shutting down the entire Sprint 5G network to legacy Sprint customers. This affected several customers of the Sprint 5G network.

Now a person has filed a suit against T-Mobile alleging that both T-Mobile and Sprint did not take any action to safeguard the interests of customers.

T-Mobile & Sprint merger deal got closed on April 1st 2020

Jose Luis Garcia Moreno bought OnePlus 7 Pro with 5G connectivity from a Sprint store in February 2020. Two weeks later, he lost access to the 5G network.

The lawsuit alleges that T-Mobile knew what would be the impact of the merger on the network and 5G connected devices sold by Sprint Corporation. Now Mr Moreno is planning to convert thus to a class action suit by bringing on board, more people who got impacted like this.

Almost, 75000 devices got impacted by the merger as soon after shutting down of Sprint 5G services, these devices lost their functionality and compatibility completely.

The argument presented in the lawsuit is that Sprint did not inform buyers beforehand about the risk accompanied by buying 5G connected devices from the corrosion.

According to the lawsuit, devices such as the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G, Galaxy S10 5G, and LG V50 ThinQ, 5G connected to Sprint’s 2.5Ghz 5G network became incompatible with T mobile network. It happened due to differences in modems used in these models, and the companies were aware of this impact.

In 2020, when Sprint 5G network got shut down, all these customers lost access to the network speeds. They had already paid an extra amount of money in hardware costs to get access to higher internet speeds.

The lawsuit also alleges that the telecom company did not do anything to fix the issues faced by former sprint users. Instead of looking into the deficiency experiences by Sprint customers, they made alternate offers that will enable customers to make the transition to 5 G-connected devices which are compatible with the T-Mobile network.

But this alternative offer will cost customers more, as the new plans are more expensive and replacement devices need extra money.

Another lawsuit against T-Mobile

In another lawsuit, a group of subscribers of AT&T and Verizon are also suing T-Mobile. The ground for the lawsuit is that T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint Corporation reduced the competition in the market. Reduced competition results in an increase in cost for the network as other networks increased it.