With the work-from-home phenomenon becoming more of a long-term reality, T-Mobile is looking to capitalize on its 5G wireless network — expanded thanks in large part to its Sprint merger last year — to drum up more business from large companies.
The Bellevue, Wash., wireless carrier announced a new T-Mobile Home Office Internet service that includes a 5G wireless router for companies to have sent directly to employees’ homes. T-Mobile says it’s attempting to break the “stranglehold that AT&T and Verizon have on the enterprise.”
T-Mobile Home Office Internet, which starts at $90 per line per month, is part of a broader set of services for business announced by T-Mobile on Thursday morning under the name “WFX.”
Dialpad investment: The company also announced a new business-oriented phone service in partnership with San Francisco-based Dialpad. T-Mobile said it has taken an equity stake in the cloud business phone and contact center provider, in addition to an observer seat on the Dialpad board. The size of the equity stake wasn’t disclosed by the companies.
Post-merger employment: T-Mobile reported in its recent 10K annual filing that it had 75,000 employees as of the end of 2020, about 5,000 less than the combined total of Sprint and T-Mobile employees at the time of their $26.5 billion deal last year. As reported by wireless industry news publication LightReading, T-Mobile had pledged to preserve and expand the employee base.
“We’re not backing away from our commitment on jobs,” a T-Mobile spokesperson said in a statement. “In 2020 we worked through the integration and as with any merger we addressed some redundancies, however we have continued hiring in spite of a complex pandemic environment. We currently have nearly 3,000 job openings, only a portion of which are part of our Un-carrier Job initiative that we launched last summer to hire 5,000 more employees.”
Latest results: T-Mobile added a net total of 1.7 million in the fourth quarter, growing to 102 million total customers. It posted quarterly revenue of $20.3 billion and profits of $750 million.
