AT&T: Merger will help US ‘win the future’

AT&T filed its merger application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday, saying its acquisition of T-Mobile will help the country “win the future” by providing 97 percent of the population with speedy mobile broadband connections. 

“In his State of the Union address, President Obama noted the strategic importance of broadband in ‘winning the future’ by ‘encouraging American innovation’ and maintaining our global competitiveness,” the AT&T filing says. 

{mosads}Post-merger broadband deployment by AT&T “will help the U.S. meet these critical priorities.”

In hundreds of pages of arguments to an agency that is charged with studying the impact of a combination on the public, AT&T quotes at length from the same president who made a campaign promise to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement. 

That’s not the Obama promise AT&T focuses on. 

The filing reminds readers, in iterations, that virtually ubiquitous mobile broadband connectivity (and the jobs that go with it) is an unfulfilled promise looming over this president, who is poised to return to the campaign trail to answer for unemployment figures that remain a key hurdle to his reelection.

“[Obama] vowed to ‘make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage’ throughout America, not only to produce a ‘faster Internet’ and ‘fewer dropped calls,’ but also to ‘connect every part of America to the digital age,'” the filing says.

The filing draws on remarks from the president’s State of the Union address, from his wireless initiative, which aims to spread high-speed mobile broadband to virtually all Americans, and from comments by the former National Economic Council Director Larry Summers.

The filing stresses that the $39 billion deal is essential to providing more network capacity for AT&T, which has seen customer complaints skyrocket and service grind to a halt in major cities since the company began offering the data-hungry iPhone four years ago.

AT&T takes on antitrust fears, a key concern from smaller wireless carriers such as Sprint, which says a near-duopoly would exist if market-leader Verizon and AT&T are to control the lion’s share of wireless customers. 

On the contrary, the merger would “promote competition,” according to the filing.  

“By freeing the applicants from their output-suppressing capacity constraints, this transaction will leave the marketplace more dynamic and competitive than before,” the document says.

Sprint expressed confidence on Thursday that the merger, which faces reviews at the FCC and the Justice Department, will not be approved. 

“We believe the facts and law dictate that this transaction must be blocked, and are confident that the [Justice Department] and FCC will determine that this takeover is not in the interest of the American public,” said Vonya McCann, a senior vice president at Sprint.

Public interest groups also criticized AT&T’s claims after the application was filed on Thursday.

“Every time someone sees or hears an AT&T ad, or sees or hears someone defend this deal, they should think about how AT&T is simply reducing the number of national carriers from four to three,” said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a Washington nonprofit that advocates for more competition in the wireless market.