Posted by: Jim Cicconi on June 1, 2011 at 5:34 pm
While we were all getting some needed sleep last night, filings in support of our merger with T-Mobile continued to flood the FCC. The broad array of groups and elected officials who recognize the benefits of this transaction is clearly growing. Here’s just a sampling of the latest…
Highlighting what this merger will do to expand high-speed wireless broadband throughout the country, the 1.5 million member American Federation of Teachers has filed at the FCC. This means that unions comprising 16.5 million American workers have now endorsed our merger.
Also, a group of 80 companies that employ thousands of workers in the fields of IT, software development, network infrastructure, manufacturing, construction and engineering encouraged prompt approval of our merger. Citing the need to maintain a healthy communications market, the companies, including Avaya, Convergys, Fujitsu, and Research in Motion, recognize that the T-Mobile transaction will encourage private investment and will spur innovation.
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Posted by: Jim Cicconi on May 31, 2011 at 5:44 pm
There’s a lot of activity at the FCC today as interested parties continue to weigh in on our merger with T-Mobile. To be sure, the usual suspects opposing the transaction are working to create the impression their support is growing. It’s not. In fact, the opposite is true. Today, we’ll begin to see evidence of the strong public support our merger has generated – and it is perhaps the broadest, deepest range of public interest support ever filed at the FCC in support of any transaction.
Let’s keep in mind that the standard under which the FCC operates is whether a merger, in this case our merger with T-Mobile, is in the public interest. The answer from elected officials and respected state and national organizations from every walk of life is a resounding yes.
Perhaps no one understands the concept of the public interest better than the top elected official in each state. And so far the governors of 14 states, ranging from Maine to Colorado, from Michigan to Louisiana, have filed in support of our deal. So have a small but growing number of mayors representing cities from Topeka to Atlanta.
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Posted by: Joan Marsh on May 27, 2011 at 10:30 am
In our latest mythbusters blog, we take on the claims that AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile will somehow kill the explosive innovation that is currently reshaping the global wireless marketplace of devices, apps and network technologies. With appropriate credit to Mark Twain, I must proclaim that the reports of innovation’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
The opposition never really explains precisely why or how this will happen, but they are quite certain that it will. They have gone as far as to pull out a decades-old brick phone and threaten a return to that age (watch Public Knowledge testify at the May 11 hearing).
To explode this ridiculous myth, let’s again turn to some facts about what’s really going on in the device market. In the interest of space (this is a blog after all), I’ll get to the apps and network innovation facts in subsequent posts.
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