“On the morning of Aug. 31, AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said in a television interview that he expected his company’s bid for T-Mobile USA Inc. to get government approval by the first quarter of 2012,” Sara Forden and Jeff Bliss report for Bloomberg.
“An hour later, his lawyers received a call from the U.S. Justice Department, according to a person familiar with the matter,” Forden and Bliss report. “The attorneys were told the government was suing to block the $39 billion transaction, the person said. The suit halted the biggest deal of the year and drew a line in the sand on antitrust policy that may affect pending acquisitions.”
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Forden and Bliss report, “The sudden turnaround occurred because the Justice Department came to a meeting the day before looking for AT&T to lay out a game-changing national remedy to eliminate what it saw as the anticompetitive defects in the proposed merger, and that didn’t happen, said another person involved in the meeting. AT&T was under the impression that it would have more time to present ideas that would assuage the government’s reservations about the deal, another person involved in the discussions said.”
Read more in the full article here.
I can promise you that ATT could spend that 39 billion improving their network instead of buying out a competitor, with much much better results
It’s not as easy as that. AT&T’s network is actually operating pretty well, they just don’t have enough towers to support all their new customers. You can’t just go and buy new towers. No one wants a new cell tower in their neighborhood so folks fight that kind of thing tooth and nail. It takes years, as much as 5 or more some times, to get new towers. This is AT&T buying more coverage the only way they can at this point.
They can upgrade what they have.
Upgrade how? It doesn’t work that way. They’ve run out of room. They did a lot of upgrading already (cost them 10s of billions of dollars) what they need now is more towers, they’ve said as much. Once you have more people then a tower can handle the only other option is more towers.
T-Molbil is on the verge of going out of business and AT&T is the only one who can afford to buy them and is compatible with their tech. If AT&T doesn’t buy them they’ll just be gone anyway.
But AT&T is going to save America by bringing back the jobs they shipped over seas. How could the government do this. AT&T is such a patriotic company. Smh
Do you sell propane and propane accesories? Smh
From redstate
Today it was announced that the Department of Justice will attempt to block AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile. The deal is needed for technical and regulatory reasons to allow AT&T to compete in the 4G wireless market with Verizon, Sprint/Clearwire, and with the upcoming competitor LightSquared. So why is the Department of Justice calling it bad for competition?
Enter R. Gerard Salemme. It’s not a well-known name, but it’s been an important one in the Obama administration. It’s also a name that often comes up in the ventures of one Craig McCaw. Craig McCaw is an equal opportunity donor who gives to anyone who looks likely to win, including Gore 2000, Bush 2004, and both sides in 2008.
That $2,300 donation to Obama sure is paying off.
There’s a complicated web here, but I’ll do my best to explain it. R. Gerard Salemme is a man who has moved from one company to another in recent years, co-founding Eagle River, and working at XO, Clearwire, and now ICO Global Communications. What those firms all have in common is that they’re also firms invested in or founded by Craig McCaw, who’s Salemme’s business partner at Eagle River, and has often taken leadership roles in these firms. In particular, McCaw founded Clearwire, which operates a 4G wireless network.
Craig McCaw also took over Nextel, shaped it up, and sold it off to Sprint. Sprint Nextel currently owns a majority of Clearwire.
Where does Obama come in? In 2009, Salemme took time off from his job at Clearwire to join the Barack Obama transition team. One project of his was digital television transition issues, where he promoted the famous delay in the DTV transition. You see, the longer the DTV delay took, the longer it would be before Verizon Wireless could get its hands on the “C Block” of spectrum to aid its own 4G rollout, in order to compete with Clearwire’s network.
So the Obama administration took action, dragging its feet on DTV, in a way that hindered 4G competition. Salemme’s employer stood to benefit. Big surprise!
The time has now come for Clearwire’s 4G competition to be expanded further, as AT&T seeks to get ahold of T-Mobile’s spectrum, to allow it to roll out 4G wireless to over 95% of Americans. So naturally, the Obama DoJ is seeking to stop that from happening.
Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy your Hope and Change in the new Culture of Corruption.
Damn, i just learned something… Thank you.