To be honest, I’m surprised it took this long. But now it seems our government here in the U.S. has finally decided to take action and attempt to stop a merger that should not take place anyway.
That’s right, the government has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block AT&T’s proposed $39 Billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA. According to the complaint, such a deal would “substantially lessen competition” in the U.S. wireless market. Bloomberg reports that the complaint was filed with the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday, and the government is asking for a declaration that the proposed merger would violate U.S. antitrust laws.
“AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low- priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market,” the U.S. said in its filing. AT&T has argued that it needs T-Mobile’s spectrum in order to improve service quality and cover the majority of the U.S. population with 4G LTE service.
Well, I can understand them wanting to improve service quality. However, competition is good and as long as T-Mobile is around, AT&T will have to work that much harder. That won’t hurt them one bit. In fact, it might just help them.
Bedlam
August 31, 2011 at 6:30 pmSo….Sprint, Verizon, Boost Mobile, Virgin, Cricket, MetroPCS, Tracfone, and US Cellular don’t have the competitive might to take on AT&T/TMobile? We need to have T-Mobile around to keep providing low quality phones on a less than stellar network.
Chris Ullrich
September 1, 2011 at 12:48 amCompetition is good. The more the better. And no, T-Mobile is a much bigger company and has much more national reach than most of those others.
Only Sprint and Verizon are true competition for AT&T but they are not GSM. T-Mo is the only real GSM competitor.