VoiceStream Wireless

» see voicestream.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A carrier is the one product category that cannot cross a border. VoiceStream sold minutes in American cities on towers in American counties under an American license, so there was never a version of this that was going to reach me. What did reach me, years earlier and without either of us noticing, was the standard it was built on.

The company started in 1994 as the personal communications services arm of Western Wireless out of Bellevue, Washington, and separated into its own listed company on 3 May 1999. It spent the next fourteen months buying the other GSM operators in the country, because there were not many: Omnipoint on 25 February 2000, Aerial Communications on 4 May 2000. By the end of 2001 it had roughly seven million subscribers and nineteen thousand employees, which made it small. The four carriers ahead of it were much larger and none of them ran GSM.

That is what it was actually selling. Deutsche Telekom completed its purchase on 31 May 2001 at a price around thirty-five billion dollars, and picked up Powertel alongside it. The premium was not for seven million American customers. It was for a network a German company already knew how to operate, on the same frequencies as its handsets, with the same SIM cards.

Meanwhile Turkey had been GSM since 1994 and I never once thought about it as a choice. You bought a phone, you bought a SIM, you put the SIM in the phone, and if you changed operator the phone did not care. That was just what a mobile phone was. Reading about the American market of the same years is reading about a country where the phone belonged to the network, where switching meant a new handset, and where the company betting against all of that had six percent of the market and got bought for thirty-five billion dollars for exactly that reason.

~ the case file ~

~ the gsm bet ~

American mobile in 2000 was four incompatible systems inside one country. Verizon and Sprint ran CDMA while AT&T Wireless and Cingular ran TDMA, and Nextel ran iDEN, which was really a dispatch radio with billing attached to it. VoiceStream and Omnipoint ran GSM, the European standard, which meant a removable SIM and a phone that worked in most of the rest of the world.

This looked like a weakness for most of the nineties. GSM coverage in the United States was thin and concentrated in cities, so a VoiceStream customer driving between them lost signal in places where a Verizon customer did not. The compensation was that a VoiceStream phone worked when you got off a plane anywhere else. That was a niche product in 1999 and the foundation of the industry by 2008, and the company that had been right about it was already called something else by then.

~ the day the name changed ~

The corporate rename happened quietly on 2 September 2001, when VoiceStream Wireless Inc became T-Mobile USA Inc on paper. The signs took another year. The rollout started in California and Nevada in july 2002 and finished nationally on 4 September 2002, when every remaining store, bill and advertisement switched over on the same day.

Jamie Lee Curtis had fronted the VoiceStream campaigns for years, standing in front of a whiteboard explaining rate plans. She went with the name. Catherine Zeta-Jones took over for T-Mobile and stayed until 2006. If you want a marker for the end of VoiceStream that a normal person would have noticed, it was that: the woman in the ads changed, and the phone in your pocket kept working.

~ what it became ~

Everything VoiceStream built is still running. T-Mobile US bought MetroPCS in 2013, listed on the New York Stock Exchange as TMUS, spent a decade as the loud one in the market, and absorbed Sprint in 2020. The magenta is Deutsche Telekom's corporate color and has been since the nineties, which is why an American network is painted the same shade as a German one.

So this is a grave for a name and not for a service. Nothing was switched off on 4 September 2002 and no customer lost anything. That still makes it a death, because a carrier is mostly a brand attached to spectrum, and the brand is the part people actually had a relationship with. Eight years of American advertising went into teaching people the word VoiceStream, and then it was thrown away in one morning because a company in Bonn had a better one.

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