Posted by: Joan Marsh on July 5, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Late last month, 76 Democratic Congressional Representatives urged the FCC and the Department of Justice to give important consideration to the increased broadband wireless coverage that will be made possible by AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile. More specifically, the letter recognized the significant benefits of expanded LTE broadband services to 55 million Americans that might not otherwise see 4G LTE deployments in their communities.
AT&T has made clear that the scale, spectrum, and other resources generated by the transaction will permit AT&T to deploy LTE – the premier next-generation wireless broadband technology – to more than 97% of the U.S. population. That deployment in turn will create jobs, incent investment, help bridge the digital divide and help achieve the Administration’s broadband objectives for rural America, relying entirely on private capital and without the expenditure of government funds.
Free Press has long acknowledged that high-speed broadband Internet access has become a necessity for productivity and economic growth. Free Press also acknowledges that more than one-third of Americans still lack access to a high speed service in their home and laments that “whole regions of the country are not being served by broadband providers.” Yet, when confronted with AT&T’s commitment to deploy LTE – a faster and more spectrally efficient wireless broadband technology – to a significant portion of all Americans now under-served, Free Press glibly accuses us of misleading members of Congress and making “phony promises.” In support of this, Free Press points to our ongoing efforts to expand our HSPA+ deployments – apparently concluding that HSPA+ is the same as LTE.
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Posted by: Joan Marsh on June 28, 2011 at 5:40 pm
The FCC released its 15th Annual Wireless Competition Report yesterday, and the Commission should be commended for the impressive body of work that the Report represents. The Report offers a rigorous analysis of competition within multiple sectors of the wireless marketplace and highlights several key trends. The results are impressive – and they clearly portray a competitive and innovative U.S. wireless marketplace that is delivering incredible value for U.S. wireless consumers.
Importantly, the Report relies as its bedrock on an impressive compendium of facts and hard data on various aspects of the wireless industry. And taken as whole, the Report offers a decisive factual rebuttal of much of the rhetoric that has filled the debate on AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile.
Let’s look at just a few of the Report’s many findings:
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Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on June 21, 2011 at 2:30 pm
By Wayne Watts, AT&T Senior Executive VP and General Counsel
In my 28 years as a lawyer with AT&T, I have been involved in a number of major transactions. Each has presented different issues, involved different competitive landscapes and was reviewed by different Administrations. One constant, though, is that all of them were subjected to a thorough, fact-based review.
I have no doubt that this will be the case again as the FCC and DOJ review the AT&T/T-Mobile transaction. It is for that reason that AT&T and T-Mobile USA have gone to great lengths to support our merger with facts. We have produced millions of pages of documents and extensively detailed pleadings supported by 19 sworn declarations.
On the other hand, final comments were filed yesterday at the FCC and merger opponents like Sprint continue to base their opposition on hyperbole, not fact.
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