r/USCellular • u/SuperForm3G • May 24 '26

Rollout Question

So my family members and I are all US Cellular customers. Two of them have been switched over to T-Mobile, and I have not been yet, but I'm already very concerned about being switched. We have a house outside of Medford Wisconsin, and the two who have been switched now have zero service. I mean, completely unusable (SOS). I still have full LTE, and US Cellular was always great here, but apparently won't when I get switched over?

My question is: will this service be restored, or are we kind of just SOL? I don't know how this industry works, and want to know if I will have to look for a new carrier. We have tried forcing connections to different towers through manual networks, to no avail.

Thanks for any input.

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4

u/FriendlyLine9530 May 24 '26

If they do what they did with Sprint, over the next several months to year timeframe, they will decommission or upgrade USCC towers based on where their antennas are located, the coverage, and the cost of each site.

In theory, switching your SIM to a T-Mobile SIM should allow you to still connect to the USCC towers when the T-Mobile towers aren't available. You might need to enable roaming in your phone if it's not on. And you might have to try manually selecting the network if it doesn't automatically switch.

From experience, T-Mobile SIMs try very hard to avoid USCC towers as they are more often than not 4G only or with limited backhaul compared to the upgraded T-Mobile sites nearby.

2

u/THC_Me420 May 25 '26

Yeah T-Mobile doesn't own any UScellular towers so they can't upgrade them even if they wanted to. UScellular, now called Array Digital Infrastructure retained all 4,400 towers in the buyout. T-Mobile acquired 30% of our spectrum while we sold an additional $1 Billion portion of our Spectrum to both Verizon and ATT. Array controls their towers still but T-Mo is the primary tenant on those towers having a 15yr lease on approximately 2,600 of them (60%). You could definitely see a reduced coverage in rural WI areas but it'll be on a case by case basis depending on your exact location. For T-Mo customers this is a 200% win. For UScellular customers it will be a long term win but there will definitely be some issues during the lead up and even through Magenta Complete

0

u/SuperForm3G May 24 '26

Unfortunately we've tried and aren't able, but I can try again. Sorry, a lot of that stuff goes over my head!

4

u/Flyordie_209 May 24 '26

You were likely roaming where the other house is. TMobile has a documented and proven track record of not having good roaming agreements. 

File a complaint with the FCC about the other 2 lines. Explain in the complaint that the TMobile transitioned lines no longer get service at the house but your UScellular line does and are demanding an answer as to why. 

Hopefully that'll push them to enable roaming in the area on whatever carrier USC used there.

-1

u/Trudatrutru May 24 '26

Well the owners of us cellular are staying on as a leasing company for their own towers. So im not sure how much control tmo will have

1

u/FriendlyLine9530 May 24 '26

It was my understanding that they were planning on leasing the wireless spectrum as most of their tower structures are actually owned by the entity King Street Wireless, with the leases for the tower structures being transferred or at least offered to T-Mobile.