MetroPCS goes live in NYC, Boston

Regional wireless operator MetroPCS doesn’t look so regional anymore. Today it announced it has launched its unlimited voice service in the greater New York City and Boston metropolitan regions, adding two of the country’s largest markets to its growing footprint and rounding out its strategic push in to the Northeast.

The two new CDMA networks, built by Alcatel-Lucent, use the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum Metro won at auction in 2006, spectrum that has allowed MetroPCS to expand beyond the West Coast and southeast into some of the largest cities in the US. Using the new licenses, Metro went live in Las Vegas and Shreveport, La., early last year, following up with Philadelphia in the summer. Compared to fellow regional CDMA operator and fellow AWS license winner, Leap Wireless, Metro has been moving quickly to bring its networks online. Not only has it met all of its stated launch targets, in many cases it has beaten them. Las Vegas and Philadelphia all went live a quarter earlier than Metro originally projected, and while the Boston launch met Metro’s first-quarter target, New York wasn’t scheduled for commercial launch until the second quarter.

Both Metro and Leap have similar business models, offering no-contract flat-rate unlimited calling service within local markets with plans starting as low $30 a month. Instead of selling escalating buckets of minutes, Metro upsells expanding calling services that it adds onto its baseline unlimited plans. For instance, with a $35-a-month plan, customers can make unlimited domestic long-distance calls, and with a $45-a-month plan, they can roam outside of their home networks into regions where Metro also offers service or has roaming agreements. When Metro was a smaller operator, centered in California, it didn’t register on most operators’ radar, but as it has expanded its footprint and grown its customer base to 5.4 million, major operators have started to take notice of its business model. Last month, Sprint introduced a $50-a-month unlimited plan over prepaid subsidiary Boost mobile, which Sprint acknowledged was targeted directly at the likes of MetroPCS and Leap.

In New York, Metro is covering the five boroughs as well as Newark, Jersey City and Paterson, N.J. In Boston, the footprint extends beyond the metropolitan region proper to cover Worcester, Mass.; Providence, R.I.; and Manchester, N.H. Metro didn’t reveal any specific details of its retail sales operations in the two new markets. Typically it begins offering services in a new market through its Website and then expands into authorized retailers, but according to Metro’s Website, it already has nine MetroPCS stores running in the New York area and eight stores in the Boston region, as well as more than 200 authorized dealers in each market.

With today’s launches, Metro has deployed networks over the bulk of the spectrum in new markets it acquired in the 2006 AWS auctions, but it may still have more room to expand, as it has since picked up more AWS spectrum from NextWave.