Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

T-Mobile CEO Leaves While Company Continues to Struggle

Ian Bell
By

T-Mobile USA, the wireless carrier that’s struggling against larger rivals, on Wednesday said CEO Robert Dotson will resign next year.

Dotson is leaving for personal reasons, the company said. He will be replaced in February 2011 by Philipp Humm, an executive from T-Mobile USA’s parent company, German phone company Deutsche Telekom AG.

Recommended Videos

Dotson said that after 15 years with the company, he plans to step down to devote more time to his family and “take on entirely new and unique challenges.”

Related

Humm, 50, was the managing director of Deutsche Telekom’s German wireless arm from 2005 and 2008, and “turned it around during his tenure to become Germany’s leading mobile operator in both subscribers as well as service revenues.”

He resigned from T-Mobile Deutschland to take responsibility for the loss of 17 million subscriber records to theft in 2006, and the company’s subsequent handling of the breach. The company said in 2008 that there was no sign the data had been misused.

T-Mobile USA, which is based in Bellevue, Wash., has been losing high-paying, contract-signing customers since last summer, and its quarterly revenues peaked in 2008. As the No. 4 carrier, it is finding it tough to compete against the much larger Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. Industrywide growth in contract-signing customers has stalled this year, and carriers now gain subscribers mainly by winning them over from other carriers.

T-Mobile USA has compensated for declining numbers of new contract-signing customers by selling prepaid service without contracts, but the competition has intensified in that market as well, both from new entrants like MetroPCS Communications Inc. and from No. 3 carrier Sprint Nextel Corp.

Before joining Deutsche Telekom, Humm worked for 10 years for a number of U.S.-based companies including McKinsey & Co., Procter & Gamble Co., and Amazon.com Inc.

In related news, AT&T is slamming T-Mobile for falsely advertising their HSPA+ product as a true 4G service.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Ian Bell
Ian Bell
Publisher
I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?
The 5G speed race is over and T-Mobile has won
Cell phone tower shooting off pink beams with a 5G logo next to it.

Every few months, a new market analysis comes out comparing the top 5G performance and availability among U.S. carriers. Each time, we wonder if the latest report will finally topple T-Mobile, which has held a commanding lead over rivals AT&T and Verizon for years. Yet, with each new report, T-Mobile pulls farther ahead while AT&T and Verizon are left in the dust.

With that in mind, Opensignal's latest 5G Experience Report doesn't bring too many surprises, at least in broad strokes. T-Mobile continues to deliver 5G download speeds that are more than twice those of any other carrier and more than twice the 5G availability. This means you won't just get faster performance on T-Mobile's 5G network, but you're more likely to be able to find a 5G connection.

Read more
T-Mobile’s newest plans are exciting for new (and old) customers
The T-Mobile logo on a smartphone.

T-Mobile has just unveiled a new set of plans and perks to help both new and current customers break free of lengthy device contracts while guaranteeing you'll be able to get the best deals available on phone upgrades every two years.

Significantly, with the new plans, the "Un-carrier" promises equal treatment for all customers, whether they're coming over from another carrier or have been using T-Mobile's services for years. That's in contrast to the limited-time offers of its rivals, which often ignore their most loyal subscribers in an effort to entice others to switch carriers.

Read more
T-Mobile’s 5G is still unmatched — but have speeds plateaued?
Woman holding up smartphone with speed test results on Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband network.

Each time a new analysis of mobile network performance gets published, it’s almost a given that we’ll see T-Mobile leading the pack in terms of delivering the fastest 5G speeds. After all, the “Un-carrier” had a massive lead in deploying its 5G networks — and it hasn’t been resting on its laurels.

However, its competitors haven’t been sitting still either. While Verizon may have been starting from behind, it’s been aggressively deploying the faster 5G spectrum that gave it a nice leap in 5G performance last year. Still, Verizon and AT&T are lagging quite a bit in overall mobile network performance, and AT&T has fallen even farther behind when it comes to delivering the best 5G speeds across the nation.

Read more