The business of cellular phone coverage was and still is an ever-changing field. There were a few different vendors back in the late 1990s and early 2000s touting different phones and services. The ownership of cellular towers and the different networks used was akin to the Wild West of the late 1800s, it was a free-for-all. When the dust settled in the late 2000s, there were three main companies: Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile.

T-Mobile rose through the ranks of being a smaller carrier in the US market (T-Mobile is based out of Germany) in the early 2000s to becoming one of the biggest cellular service providers in the country. They reached a crossroads in 2006 when they realized that the network infrastructure they had been using simply wasn’t working anymore and set out to change it. T-Moblie changed to an RSP (Retail Services Platform) to combat the inherent problems (network failures, high costs, etc.) that they were facing.