During T-Mobile’s special press conference this morning, they are dropping bomb after bomb. Not only has their 4G LTE gone live, but they have announced that the iPhone 5 is finally making its way to their network. Oh, wait, we don’t care about that. Luckily for us Android lovers, they mentioned they would be offering the Galaxy S4 from Samsung too, starting May 1. There was no word of pricing, but it will feature their 4G LTE, which is a good sign for them. 

Today, T-Mobile flipped the switch on their 4G LTE. Launching with an initial seven markets spread across the U.S., T-Mobile plans to cover roughly 100 million users by mid-2013 and then around 200 million by the end of the year. Listed below are the cities that currently support the new LTE. 

Over the weekend, T-Mobile’s new rate plans went live. These plans are available at third party nationwide retailers, as well as authorized dealers. As far as pricing, many things have changed, but have become more unified in a way. We will try to give a basic overview of what we are now dealing with below. 

We have been bouncing around, waiting for official word from T-Mobile to see which cities would receive their 4G LTE first. So far, we have seen it spotted in Kansas City and Las Vegas, but thanks to the crowd-sourced OpenSignal mobile coverage tracker, we can see it is up in about 8-9 cities. 

On March 24th, T-Mobile is set to introduce their “UNcarrier Classic Plans” that will affect all of their current rate plans going forward. Once in effect, all of T-Mobile’s plans will include unlimited talk, text, and be bundled with 500MB of data. If you need more than 500MB of data per month, you can easily upgrade and throw on however much you need, with each 2GB costing $10 and up. 

According to reports, T-Mobile is going to officially flip the switch on their 4G LTE network by the end of March. With an update set for the Galaxy Note 2 to activate the LTE radio inside, it’s looking like the time has come for T-Mo to enter the race. On top of that, the Galaxy S3 LTE on the network is scheduled to be released on March 27, which is perfect timing. 

Much like we saw with the HTC One, carriers are quick to ride the wave of hype that manufacturers are creating. AT&T and T-Mobile launched pre-registration pages for the Samsung Galaxy S4, but with no detailed availability or pricing. No real surprise there.

Today, T-Mobile is one step closer to a merger with MetroPCS after the FCC released a statement giving the two companies their blessing. Since the proposed merger that originated in October, the Department of Justice and FCC have been reviewing the deal and neither have found objections to these two companies getting together.

This doesn’t mean that it is a done deal yet, both companies still need to get together and vote on whether they want to join or not. This would however boost T-Mobile’s reach across the country, giving them more spectrum to support their customers and move securely into that fourth largest carrier spot. As T-Mo ramps up towards LTE in the near future, this will be a good acquisition if they can get the deal done.

Via: Phandroid