T-Mobile USA will emerge from its failed deal with AT&T (NYSE: T) with better coverage and a fat $6 billion breakup fee associated with the proposed $39 billion deal's collapse.

Still, parent company Deutsche Telekom said these developments are only a short-term fix for T-Mobile, which still needs more airwaves to deploy the next-generation of network technology, Long Term Evolution (LTE).

T-Mobile will obtain a seven-year roaming deal with AT&T, which in turn expands T-Mobile's coverage by about 20 percent as part of the $6 billion breakup fee.

The fee includes $3 billion in cash, which Deutsche Telekom said it expects to be paid by year's end. Additionally, the roaming agreements and spectrum T-Mobile will get are worth $3 billion. AT&T will give T-Mobile a seven-year UMTS roaming agreement that will allow T-Mobile to expand its coverage to 280 million POPs from 230 million today. T-Mobile will also get spectrum from AT&T in 128 market areas, including in 12 of the top 20 markets in the United States: Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.

"With the spectrum we're getting, we have a better chance of expanding the network in many markets," Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann said during a conference call with reporters. "That is not a final solution. In the long term, we need more spectrum and network capacity. We are working on that."

The proposed merger hit another major snag last month as the Federal Communications Commission's staff declared that the deal was contrary to the public interest and would result in the biggest single concentration in the U.S. mobile market in history. The Department of Justice was also opposed to the deal.

While T-Mobile may not be the top choice for enterprise IT, it does put pricing and service quality pressure on AT&T, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S). What's more, as the Justice Department noted in its complaint, T-Mobile was on its way to becoming a larger player in the enterprise and government markets. The carrier stated in its 2011 business plan that it aimed to increase enterprise revenues substantially by 2013.

For more:
- see this FierceWireless article

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