AfterDawn: Tech news

Sprint files lawsuit to block AT&T purchase of T-Mobile

Written by Rich Fiscus @ 06 Sep 2011 3:45 User comments (1)

Sprint files lawsuit to block AT&T purchase of T-Mobile Sprint has filed a lawsuit attempting to block the sale of T-Mobile to AT&T. The suit names AT&T, AT&T Mobility, Deutsche Telekom, and T-Mobile as defendants.
Deutsche Telekom is the corporate parent of T-Mobile.

Sprint claims the deal would result in less competition, harm to smaller wireless carriers, and increased costs to consumers:

a combined AT&T and T-Mobile would have the ability to use its control over backhaul, roaming and spectrum, and its increased market position to exclude competitors, raise their costs, restrict their access to handsets, damage their businesses and ultimately to lessen competition.


Sprint's lawsuit follows a similar action by the US Department of Justice last week.

If the acquisition fails to meet regulatory approval, which seems likely based on recent events, it may end up being information accidentally presented to the Federal Communications Commission as part of a filing that ends up derailing it.



In that filing, AT&T admitted it would cost less than $4 billion to expand their LTE network coverage, even without buying T-Mobile.

This contradicts one of their arguments to regulators that they need to purchase T-Mobile for $39 billion, to accomplish the same thing.

Previous Next  

1 user comment

19.9.2011 14:24

First off, isn't Sprint a little bit F'ing late to the party to be jumping on the keyboard of carnage? Not to mention the fact; doesn't Verizon have quite a belligerent slant in the communications market at the moment?

I fell out of touch (educationally) once AT&T got busted up the first time... So I can only assume that when Verizon started to encroach into similar financial waters as they did, they voluntarily split into Frontier/Verizon & you now have the convenient cluster we have today.

AT&T still seems to want to maintain their conceited monicker & push people around with the same gusto that they once had. Problem is, they might not have 'quite' the same monetary Gestapo push anymore.

That & RICH is starting to become a four letter word in this economy right at the moment.

Comments have been disabled for this article.

News archive