Posted by: Joan Marsh on May 17, 2011 at 3:28 pm
A lot of myths were perpetuated by some witnesses at the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing last Wednesday regarding our proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. The enemy of myth is, of course, fact, and over the next several days, we will debunk these myths in a series of blogs. So, stay tuned.
To start, I want to address Public Knowledge’s argument that AT&T should “stop operating” three different types of technologies, a system which they view as “inefficient” and spectrally “wasteful.” Let’s play that out and see precisely what that world looks like.
First, AT&T would promptly shut down its 2G GSM network – a network that currently supports tens of millions of devices, including handsets for our pre-paid products that are particularly important to fixed and low income customers. As a result, all those handsets would go dark and that customer base would be required to go purchase new mobile broadband (UMTS) handsets, which are generally more expensive.
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Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on May 4, 2011 at 10:21 am
The following statement is in response to Sprint’s filing with the West Virginia Public Service Commission and may be attributed to J. Michael Schweder, AT&T’s President of the Mid-Atlantic Region:
“AT&T is trying to bring the latest and fastest mobile Internet service to most of the citizens of West Virginia. Since Sprint is trying to stop that, we hope state officials will ask Sprint what its own plans are for bringing LTE speeds to the people of West Virginia. We suspect Sprint either has no such plan, or that its own plans pale in comparison to AT&T’s. In either case, we’re confident West Virginians will see Sprint’s filing for what it is – a cynical effort to hurt a competitor, even if the ones truly hurt are the many people of West Virginia who would be denied the fast mobile Internet speeds they need and want.”
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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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