The head of technology at T-Mobile is retiring at the age of 58.
(Photo: Deutsche Telekom)
san francisco After 23 years with the company, top network boss Neville Ray is leaving the US mobile communications company T-Mobile. The company announced that the head of technology at Deutsche Telekom’s US subsidiary will retire in the fall.
Ray is among the highest paid executives in the telecom industry. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that he was paid around $11.5 million in fiscal 2021 alone. For comparison: According to the Dax company, the CEO of Deutsche Telekom, Timotheus Höttges, received total remuneration of around seven million euros for the 2021 financial year.
Since entering the US market at the beginning of the millennium, Deutsche Telekom has had major problems with the quality of its network. Ray wanted to change that, under his leadership T-Mobile US gradually expanded its market position.
The decisive breakthrough came with the expansion of 5G real-time mobile communications. T-Mobile was able to roll out the latest generation of mobile communications much faster than its rivals AT&T and Verizon.
Ray said: “It’s bittersweet, but now that T-Mobile’s network leadership has been established, there has never been a better time to announce my resignation.” Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges joked about Ray’s departure: Ray is the company’s most expensive employee, because the expansion of the network in the USA has devoured so much money. “It was worth it. Because today our American network is number one,” wrote Höttges.
Major US grid failure
Only a short time later, there was a major outage in the T-Mobile network in the USA. T-Mobile users reported more than 80,000 problem reports to the Downdetector troubleshooting service.
Ray blamed a service provider for the problems, from which the Telekom subsidiary rents fiber optic cables. Unlike in Germany, where Telekom owns much of the fiber optic network that the company uses, it is common in the US to rent the network from third-party providers.
Users reported that they were no longer able to dial 911 either. In 2021, T-Mobile was already sued because the US emergency number 911 could not be reached in more than 20,000 cases. T-Mobile settled the case by paying $19.5 million.
Just a few weeks earlier, T-Mobile had admitted that hackers had stolen sensitive data from 37 million customers. This was the eighth data breach in six years at the telecom company. T-Mobile was fined $350 million for a data breach in August 2021 that stole the data of 77 million users.
Ray’s successor as head of technology is to be Ulf Ewaldsson. He joined T-Mobile four years ago after having worked for European network supplier Ericsson for around three decades.
More: Hackers attack US telecom subsidiary – data stolen from 37 million customers over weeks