Nils Paellmann, T-Mobile VP of investor relations, details plans to open 400 more postpaid stores by the end of 2016.
T-Mobile US’ VP of investor relations, Nils Paellmann, in a recent interview discussed the carrier’s success, as well as plans to expand its marketing/distribution footprint as it expands its network into new markets.
T-Mobile US currently has around 3,600 postpaid stores, he said, and the plan is to hit the 4,000 mark by the end of the year. Speaking during the Oppenheimer 19th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference, Paellmann said network expansion drives the ability to expand the marketing presence.
“We don’t market our service everywhere we have coverage today,” he said. “We have said that this year we want to expand … to about 4,000 by the end of this year. Now that we have a lot more coverage, we can expand our marketing footprint as well. The sequence is really coverage first, then build out the marketing footprint.”
Citing recent reports from Open Signal and Ookla, which found that T-Mobile US offers the fastest 4G download speeds of the four major domestic carriers, Paellmann said being late to 4G proved a benefit.
“We came a little bit late to the LTE game compared to the others. The advantage of that was we were able to deploy the latest technology,” including three-band carrier aggregation and 4X4 multiple-input, multiple-output.
He also said network success was based on T-Mobile US’ spectrum position, including megahertz per customer. “We have a good spectrum position, especially in midband. We have a very dense network. We had to build out a very dense network because historically we didn’t have the benefit of low-band, which is now being deployed around the country with plans to reach 270 million low-band [points of presence] by the end of 2016.”
Click here to download the full audio from the Oppenheimer-hosted session.
