Posted by: Joan Marsh on April 21, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Today, we filed some paperwork with the FCC – our official applications to transfer licenses from T-Mobile USA, Deutsche Telekom ’s U.S. subsidiary, to AT&T. We also filed a public interest statement and some other supporting documents. It’s certainly a lot to read so we tried to break it down into key points. You can check out a comprehensive executive summary of our filing on our MobilizeEverything website.
The bottom line is that our merger with T-Mobile USA will offer significant benefits to American consumers. It will address capacity constraints that both of our companies face, which will enable the combined company to provide improved services in the many urban, suburban, and rural markets where the enormous surge in broadband usage is fast consuming available capacity. What this means is fewer dropped calls, fewer failed call attempts, and better data throughput.
Our subscribers have the highest percentage of data hungry smartphones among all U.S. wireless providers. We’ve seen mobile data volumes on our network skyrocket by a staggering 8000% from 2007 to 2010…and we expect to see accelerating growth going forward.
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Posted by: Jim Cicconi on April 15, 2011 at 5:44 pm
We have great respect for Dan Hesse as an executive, but his comments today about AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile are way off base. They’re also totally at odds with his own past statements.
As recently as last October, Mr. Hesse said the wireless industry is ‘hyper competitive‘. The month prior, his CFO talked about how ‘tough‘ retail competition is in the wireless market, citing at least six major competitors. In February of last year, Mr. Hesse said, “M&A is absolutely a way to get the growth in the industry, if a particular transaction makes sense for anybody.” He went on to say, “I think consolidation will be healthy for the industry, some consolidation. It is, needless to say, very competitive.” And in January of last year at a Citi Global Conference, Mr. Hesse said, “Well, there is no question that we have an extremely competitive wireless industry in this country and that the pricing is getting much more aggressive.”
Given that Sprint is a major competitor to AT&T in the hyper competitive wireless market Mr. Hesse describes, no one should be surprised that they would oppose this merger. But it is self-serving for them to argue that the highly competitive wireless market they cited only months ago is now threatened by the very type of transaction they seemed prepared to defend previously.
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Posted by: Joan Marsh on April 14, 2011 at 2:26 pm
A few weeks ago, AT&T announced an agreement to acquire T-Mobile USA. While some people were surprised by the announcement, the main reason for the deal was obvious to anyone who has been following the rapid growth of the wireless industry – we need more capacity to address the surging demand for mobile broadband.
AT&T’s wireless broadband networks continue to carry a tremendous amount of data traffic. You’ve heard the stats: wireless data traffic on our network is up over 8000% in the last four years and we anticipate it will be 8 to 10 times greater by 2015. The surest, fastest and most efficient path by far to addressing the capacity limitations we face in the near term is to acquire T-Mobile and its highly complementary spectrum portfolio and network assets. It was the deal hiding in plain sight.
The result of the combination will be extraordinary: the denser network of cell sites will drive capacity improvements and speed gains; spectral efficiencies will be gained by the combinations of two 2G networks into one, including less spectrum used for call set up and control, and more opportunities to migrate bands to support mobile broadband services.
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