T-Mobile USA CEO Philipp Humm Suddenly Resigns

Philipp Humm, the CEO of T-Mobile USA, has resigned.

Jim Alling, T-Mobile’s COO, will take over his duties while a search is under way. In a statement, the company said that Humm is going to pursue a career outside of Deutsche Telekom, which owns the U.S. wireless carrier.

GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham writes, “The change up top could be seen as fallout from the failure to close the acquisition by AT&T as well as an indication of T-Mobile’s tough road ahead in the U.S. market.” With its plans to swap spectrum with Verizon to cover more areas of the country it looks like T-Mobile is going ahead with this whole running-a-wireless-carrier idea as opposed to selling out. That’s going to take a different set of skills at the top, and perhaps Humm felt it was time to go.