In a blog post on Friday, the No. 4 carrier rejected the idea that pooled data plans will end up being a better value.

“Do families really want to keep track of each others’ data consumption?” T-Mobile said. “We don’t think so. Just imagine mom’s email is suddenly unavailable because her teenage son watched an HD movie on his phone, consuming the family’s data allotment.”

Verizon has said it will offer tiered data plans starting in midsummer, while AT&T has said it is working on a family data plan of its own. Sprint, meanwhile, is keeping its focus on unlimited plans as well.

T-Mobile acknowledges that bandwidth is a limited resource, but says that shared data is not the way to go.

The No. 4 U.S. carrier said that it is eliminating some jobs and outsourcing others, while also staffing up in some areas, such as business sales.

“T-Mobile previously announced its intent to restructure and optimize operations throughout the company in order to best reposition the company, given today’s demanding and rapidly evolving marketplace,” the company said in a statement to AllThingsD. “This week we are communicating to our employees a series of additional organizational changes to best position T-Mobile to powerfully compete and return to growth.”

Parent company Deutsche Telekom has agreed to pump billions of dollars into the struggling carrier to help modernize its network and launch high-speed LTE service. At the same time, T-Mobile has continued to lose contract customers and has said it needs to better align its cost structure even as it tries to regain lost ground.

As part of last week’s earnings report, the company said it aims to beef up efforts to sell to businesses, among other efforts.

Earlier this year, T-Mobile announced a first wave of cuts that included the closing of several call centers and at the time indicated further restructuring was on the horizon. The company has also said it is exploring whether to sell its cell towers.

According to a memo obtained by the Verge, CEO Philipp Humm says affected workers will be notified this week if their job is among those being cut.

“We have tremendous employees here at T-Mobile and we truly wish we could retain all our talent, but our business realities require hard choices,” Humm said in the memo. T-Mobile said most workers will learn their fate today or tomorrow.

The latest evidence came Monday, as Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures teamed with chipmaker Nvidia to buy approximately 500 patents from IPWireless.

The patents include some related to 3G and 4G technologies, including LTE, the companies said. Terms of the deal, which closed at the end of last month, were not disclosed.

Ownership of the patents will be split between Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures, with Nvidia getting license to all of the patents it didn’t get to purchase.

Intellectual Ventures has already sued several major carriers over patents. In Febuary, it sued Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T, and last week it added U.S. Cellular to the proceedings. (Verizon Wireless, not named in the suit, is a licensee of Intellectual Ventures.)

iStockphoto | italianestro

Typically, the major carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, see some shift in their share but manage to post a cumulative gain in so-called postpaid customers.

This quarter, though, gains at Verizon and AT&T weren’t enough to offset the steep losses at T-Mobile, Sprint and other carriers. T-Mobile alone lost half a million contract customers in the January-to-March quarter, while Sprint lost 192,000 contract customers.

The Associated Press did the math and calculated a drop in the industry of 52,000 contract subscribers at the top seven carriers. That contrasts with the prepaid industry (both from the Big Four carriers and smaller players such as MetroPCS, Cricket and TracFone), which saw gains of two million customers in the quarter.

As brokerage Jefferies & Company noted ahead of the earnings report season, the cellphone industry tends to face a tough few months after the initial bump that follows the introduction of a new iPhone.

(Image courtesy of iStockphoto | italianestro)

Verizon announced its plans to buy the spectrum last December as part of a broader pact that includes a joint marketing agreement. It has said that, should regulators allow it to complete the deal, it will sell off some other spectrum, but T-Mobile and others have noted that the spectrum Verizon is offering to sell has some serious drawbacks.

T-Mobile and its partners, the Rural Cellular Association and Public Knowledge, plan to announce the new group — the Alliance for Broadband Competition — at a teleconference on Monday. Speakers will include the head of the RCA and Kathleen Ham, T-Mobile’s vice president of regulatory affairs.

Sprint is also a member of the group, though it is not listed as among the participants for Monday’s event.

While the rumored marriage of the two carriers would certainly result in a larger subscriber base, a more robust infrastructure and a nice combined swath of spectrum, there are other considerations that make the combination a bit dubious. And though chatter about a potential deal may have cheered some investors, it’s turning the stomachs of others.

To wit, Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett’s take on a T-Mobile/Metro PCS merger, which begins with an exclamation that pretty much says it all:

“Oh my, what an ugly baby.”

Moffet’s opinion is that combining two wireless weaklings just leaves you with a bigger weakling, particularly if they rely on different network technologies, as T-Mobile and MetroPCS do. T-Mobile’s network is GSM. MetroPCS’s is CDMA. In other words, a combination of the two is not a solution to either company’s problems, at least until they meet on LTE.

“Both [companies] are spectrum constrained — this wouldn’t change that — and they rely on fundamentally different technology platforms, making a combination a logistical nightmare,” Moffet says. “It will be years before either is sufficiently transitioned to LTE to make a combination truly sensible. To be sure, there would potentially be some overlapping retail stores in MetroPCS market, there would naturally be some selling, general and administrative expenses savings, and there are perhaps some savings in LTE network deployment in MetroPCS markets. But none of these benefits would provide truly compelling justification.”

And that really does seem to be the case. Though, to be fair, the combination would give T-Mobile more customers, which it could really use, after having lost more than a half-million contract customers in the first quarter.

Still, it’s far from an ideal tie-up. Said R.W. Baird’s William Power, in a note that echoes Moffet’s: “A T-Mobile/PCS merger smells like a mess to us, and seems to speak to the challenges facing the industry, exacerbated by the government rejection of the T/T-Mobile deal, which might have created spectrum opportunities for the other operators.”

The 15th straight quarter of contract customer losses puts the carrier further behind AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the race to lock users into two-year commitments.

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The former German state telecommunications monopoly said revenue in the three months ended March 31 slipped 1.1 percent on the year to €14.43 billion as it continues to struggle with the economic headwinds in many parts of Europe. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and one-time items, a number that tracks operational performance, remained unchanged at €4.48 billion, slightly ahead of analysts’ predictions.

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T-Mobile is also looking to free up space in another part of its spectrum that should finally allow iPhone users to run on its network at full speed. The company has about a million iPhone subscribers, even though those devices can only run at slow 2G speeds. T-Mobile USA does not sell the iPhone itself.

At a dinner event in New Orleans on Monday, CTO Neville Ray said that the effort to reclaim some of its 1900 MHz spectrum should reach a critical mass in the fourth quarter of this year, allowing the company to more aggressively court AT&T subscribers that are no longer under contract.

Ray declined to comment on whether the company would directly target iPhone users in a big marketing push planned for later this year.

“It would make sense,” Ray agreed, but added, “We’re not there yet.”

The company announced on Monday night two of the companies that will help it build out its next-generation network: Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.

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Today, the San Francisco company says that Sprint is coming on board to join the three other major U.S. carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile.

While the partnership provides additional momentum for Boku, the company still has a way to go before consumers are charging all sorts of purchases to their carrier bills. Today, the majority of Boku-paid purchases are for digital goods, such as in-game currency like Facebook Credits, or virtual goods in social games from companies like Zynga.

In an interview, Boku president Ron Hirson explained that it will still be another year or so before it starts seeing physical goods like clothing or electronics being charged to a carrier bill. For that to happen, carriers will have to drop the rates even lower than what they are charging today in order to be on par with Visa or MasterCard.

Over the past two years, Hirson said, prices already have dropped from roughly 40 percent to somewhere in the “teens.”

“We are proving ourselves out, and showing to the carrier that with each incremental drop, we are growing the pie,” he said.

The next likely product category to adopt carrier billing, he said, is digital content, including music, books, or physical tickets for public transportation or concerts. Those items have a big enough profit margin to make paying slightly higher transaction fees affordable.

Other companies in the carrier billing space include Mopay, BilltoMobile and Zong, which eBay’s PayPal acquired last year. Boku strengthened its position earlier this year when it raised $35 million in fresh capital.

While carrier billing has been slow to take off, Hirson said the company believes it will be a huge opportunity because of the convenience factor. To purchase something, users enter their phone number, and then authenticate that payment via text message.

Boku said today that it also signed up a carrier-billing partnership with Deutsche Telekom in Germany, meaning that it is now processing transactions with every major carrier in France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.

The company also announced that it has added two executives to its team: Jon Prideaux, the former EVP at Visa, is joining as chief business officer; and Stuart Neal, the former managing director of international development for Barclaycard, is joining as SVP of Business Development.

Apple claims Macs to be more secure than Windows PCs. In the light of recent malware attacks on the Mac platform, there are several articles on the Web questioning this claim. What is your take on this matter?

A:

Macs aren’t invulnerable to malicious software. No computer is. But the people who produce viruses and spyware have traditionally focused on Windows—and still do, primarily. There have indeed been a couple of recent instances of malware that spread among some Macs in the real world. But bear in mind that, despite the steady growth in Mac sales, Windows still powers the vast majority of the world’s PCs, and, because of that, there are hundreds of thousands of malicious programs targeting it, versus just a handful of known ones for the Mac.

So, my take on this is that while Mac users must be careful where they surf, and Apple will have to step up its game against these attacks, an unprotected Macintosh is still, in daily use, far less likely to become infected than an unprotected Windows PC. How users handle this depends on their habits and their tolerance, both for risk, and for the downsides of constantly running security software, which can sap resources and be annoying. I advise all Windows users to run such software. But I see it as optional for Mac users, at least today. Time will tell if that changes.

Q:

Do you know of any apps that work well with dictation on older iPhones?

A:

One that I have used successfully is Dragon Dictation from Nuance. The same company makes an Android app called FlexT9, which I haven’t tested, that includes dictation, among other features. Both apps work on a wide variety of models.

Q:

I love my BlackBerry for the ease of emailing and maintaining my schedule but not for accessing the Internet. I am a T-Mobile customer. Is there any device that has the good features of the BlackBerry and also easily and comprehensively accesses the Internet?

A:

T-Mobile offers a wide range of Android phones that include very good Web browsers and typically have two email apps: one for Gmail and one for all your other email accounts. They also have calendar apps.

Overall, I prefer these smartphones to current BlackBerrys and find the email experience fine. But people who are used to the BlackBerry for email—especially corporate email—sometimes complain that email on other devices isn’t as fast. This is partly because BlackBerry email is routed through a proprietary system. I’d advise asking friends or colleagues with newer T-Mobile Android phones about their email experience.

Write to Walt at mossberg.@wsj.com.

The trend follows a more aggressive push by larger carriers, such as Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA, to capture users at the lowest end of the market, by such means as free phone offerings to those on government subsidies. Investors sent shares of MetroPCS and Leap sharply lower on Thursday.

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T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, has slated the airwaves, or spectrum, for its development over the next several years of a high-speed mobile broadband network to keep pace with its larger rivals. The spectrum will bolster T-Mobile’s network in 12 large U.S. markets, according to a statement from the Bellevue, Wash.-based carrier.

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