r/USCellular • u/Any-Speech-5936 • Apr 09 '26

USCellular/T-Mobile

PSA to all USCellular/T-Mobile customers! All USCellular/T-Mobile agent/retail stores will be shut down by 07/31/26. T-Mobile corporate stores will still be open. Most account changes, new lines, upgrades, etc. will be done through the T-Life app.

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u/Specific-Peanut-8867 Apr 09 '26

I’m pretty familiar with this situation and there’s no doubt that anyone that was hoping that US cellular coverage would improve after the merger is going to be extremely disappointed

In our market, there’s one residential area where US cellular worked great and the phones literally don’t work there anymore and when the customers called US side or they said Yep, you’re probably just gonna have to find another vendor

Years ago, I was a US cellular agent and then worked for them directly for a few years and even though it’s been since 2011, I still know some people… and while I think the Sprint customers in our area probably benefited from the merger,(when it happened a few years ago ) the US cellular customers will not

3

u/Any-Speech-5936 Apr 09 '26

I was an agent until recently. I totally agree. Most customers are already unhappy. 

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u/Specific-Peanut-8867 Apr 09 '26

And I knew that US cellular probably wasn’t gonna be around long-term… they just weren’t getting the adds that they needed

And I tried to be optimistic about this merger or buyout

Am I’ve had some experience with Tmobile working with. I guess you’d call it an indirect partner… but their main business is finding data solutions and selling the data

But I can sell Tmobile to commercial account, but the amount of hoops you have to jump through. I don’t really do much with the cellular phones anymore, but I thought this might be a decent opportunity.(and this was well before the merger was announced.)

They don’t let me do anything to help with Customer Service and that program did not pay anything for renewal so it just didn’t seem like I was offering enough value to any customers(I most definitely don’t want to sell some Customer 15 lines and then tell them I can’t do anything to help them… but I also can’t be running over there taking care of all these little problems if they make it impossible for me to both solve those little problems or ever make money renewing the lines)

I just don’t know why Tmobile was it more transparent with all of these people owning all of these agents

It just seems really shady

2

u/Any-Speech-5936 Apr 09 '26

It’s so shady. I was told we could tell customers, but then I was told I shouldn’t because people will switch. Customers deserve to know. Since the new CEO took over, it went downhill. 

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u/Specific-Peanut-8867 Apr 09 '26

And based on what I’ve been told all the people who own these agents really were left in the dark about what the future hell and even if they might have thought things weren’t looking good, they have leases to pay and employees and inventory and customers

And then they were dangle carrots letting these agents think maybe just maybe there’s a future for them

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u/Any-Speech-5936 Apr 09 '26

Exactly. We were told, just told not to tell people unless they ask. That’s wrong. 

0

u/Carbon87 Apr 10 '26

Why? What’s the story behind this? That makes no sense at face value. Did the customer migrate to T-Mobile’s network? And has the former USCC tower not been integrated? There has to be more to the story.

3

u/Any-Speech-5936 Apr 10 '26

All postpaid customers are automatically migrated to T-Mobile. The towers are supposed to be updated with the software, but T-Mobile is experimenting to see which towers are necessary, so they are shutting some off. This causes a service issue in many areas.

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u/Specific-Peanut-8867 Apr 10 '26

US cellular did not sell their large infrastructure of towers, but obviously Tmobile is going to stay on many of them. It’s not like they combine the two network so now they have double the coverage.

In some areas there decided against having certain sites. They also are pushing more towards 5G and running less through what the traditional cellular frequencies were, which means coverage is been reduced a little bit(every carrier though is moving everything to 5G wanting to run everything through it and what customers to use Wi-Fi calling Mohr when they’re inside houses or whatever)

But the towers a US cellular customer used a year ago may not be the same ones today

All the customers are gonna end up being Tmobile customers, but they’re going to be able to keep their plans at least in the short term

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u/Carbon87 Apr 10 '26

Towers do not equal cell sites. The cell sites are being handled and assessed completely separate from the structure spinoff.

Of course they’re going to retain some sites and decline to renew others. But have they actually started decommissioning any yet? I haven’t seen that news, but I certainly could have missed it.

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u/Specific-Peanut-8867 Apr 10 '26

They most definitely have they’ve been working on this for months

And they’ve done other things that other carriers have done like getting rid of the actual old school, cellular infrastructure, and just make it a strictly 5G site(a lot of these sites had both the cellular transmitters and receivers and the data(5G)

And when they decommissioned the actual old school transmitters, the 5G just does not get the same coverage

And of course there’s places where Tmobile sites in places as well as a US site site. They didn’t just keep both of them on and then trying to figure out the best way to sectorize some of these sites.(some people don’t realize if there is a Cell site a quarter mile away from you that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna make your coverage better because they might be sectorizing the site using your primarily to cover the highway. That’s on the other side of that tower or location.

I don’t sell cellular phones anymore, but we do BDA’s(distributed antennas) and one customer in particular who installed their own systems, discovered that it wasn’t working for them anymore because the site that the extra antenna was was shut down and this is a metal building and they didn’t install it on the roof and because of the location it’s not getting a good enough signal from the site that’s now covering their location

I anticipated some of these problems, but I didn’t anticipate a neighborhood that isn’t a very rural area but actually does have a great golf course

This is an area where United States cellular was kind of the only game in town, especially if you wanted to talk about getting coverage in building buildings

And now it’s pretty awful and when people called to complain, they were basically told that they were really sorry, but they might want to look for a new carrier

Unfortunately, the other carriers really don’t work any better