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Monday, December 19, 2011

Money / Breaking News AT&T Leaves T-Mobile at the Altar

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 1:58 PM

AT&T said late on Monday afternoon that it had withdrawn its $39 billion takeover bid for T-Mobile USA, acknowledging that it could not overcome opposition from the Obama administration to creating the nation’s biggest cellphone service provider.

The company said in a statement that it would continue to invest in wireless spectrum, but could not overcome opposition by both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. It added that American wireless customers “will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled” by the regulators’ decisions.

I'm going to have to disagree with AT&T: This is great news for cell phone users. It's nice to see the U.S. Government stretching some of those anti-monopoly muscles. Let's hope this is just the appetizer for some new consumer-protection measures from the Justice Department and the FCC in the near future.

Comments (11) RSS

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I mostly agree that this is good news . . . at least until T-Mo folds. Which probably won't be too much longer.

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty

on December 19, 2011 at 2:15 PM

Great news for cell phone users would be if the government required interoperability between the different networks. I should be able to by a phone and put it on any network.

Posted by arbeck

on December 19, 2011 at 2:24 PM

@1: yup. I give 'em 3 years at most. They aren't moving to LTE and they have insane customer and executive turnover.

That was $4 billion well-spent, AT&T...

Posted by laterite on December 19, 2011 at 2:24 PM

Baggle

Posted by Joe Szilagyi

on December 19, 2011 at 2:26 PM

"acknowledging that it could not overcome opposition from the Obama administration to creating the nation’s biggest cellphone service provider."

It wasn't administration opposition, it was CUSTOMER OPPOSITION. Fuck AT&T in the face.

Posted by sonder on December 19, 2011 at 2:30 PM

@2: But that's what socialist Europe did! Capitalist America would never stand for that level of government intervention.

More seriously, the industry is slowly standardizing on LTE, which means we'll finally have one standard. It's crazy that we've had to wait this long for interoperability, but at least we're getting it.

Posted by aleks on December 19, 2011 at 2:32 PM

@1: "I mostly agree that this is good news . . . at least until T-Mo folds. Which probably won't be too much longer."

Yeah, it's good for America, but T-Mobile seems to have little interest in US infrastructure and will continue looking for a suitor.

Posted by undead ayn rand on December 19, 2011 at 2:39 PM

I love the way the PR reads when a corporation doesn'lt make its monopoly bid: "this will hurt 'consumers'". Hm. Dubious.

Posted by treacle on December 19, 2011 at 2:49 PM

@aleks

Yes, they're standardizing on LTE, but the LTE is not interoperable. The government needs to force this.

@laterite

HSPA+ is just find for 99% of what you need to do on mobile. Verizon though had to move to LTE because EVDO is not fast enough. Plus, as part of the agreement T-Mobile and AT&T are going to share spectrum, so I expect T-Mobile would be just fine. However, Deutsche Telekom wants to sell T-Mobile in the worst way. Sprint doesn't have the capital to buy them, so I'm not sure what is going to happen.

Posted by arbeck

on December 19, 2011 at 3:11 PM