T-Mobile this morning announced that it's merging with MetroPCS in a $1.5 billion deal. The two companies will unite under the T-Mobile name, with current TMo parent company Deutsche Telekom to keep a 74 percent stake. The rest goes to MetroPCS shareholders, who also get the cash.

There's a conference call scheduled for this morning, and we still have to find out exactly what this'll mean for consumers. But MetroPCS already has LTE up and running -- a technology sorely lacking from TMo's current U.S. offerings, so we'd expect that's part of the impetus behind all this. But it'll take a little time to get all that worked out.

Stay tuned. This should get interesting.

Update: OK, a few important points from the conference call:

The two companies actually will remain operating as fairly separate entities. Two business units. One network. MetroPCS isn't going anywhere for a few years.

They're hoping to have GSM-capable devices ready to sell on MetroPCS when the deal closes next year.

As we figured, LTE's playing ia big part here.

Source: T-Mobile