Sprint Claims AT&T Could Expand w/o Merging w/ T-Mobile

AT&T and T-Mobile are currently in the process of defending their future merger to the government. As mentioned in a previous post, the merged company would become the largest cell carrier with about 42% of the market. This would leave Sprint third in market, thus they are not a supporter of the merger. One of the strategies to prevent the merger is Sprint has attacked one of the main reasons for the merger offering an alternative.  “Sprint offers AT&T spectrum solution without merger” by Jasmin Melvin of Reuters.com reports AT&T has defended the merger as a means to use T-Mobile’s spectrum to improve their speed and  performance.

Sprint claims “AT&T could forgo the T-Mobile takeover and increase its network capacity by more than 600 percent by 2015 by simply putting its current resources to better, more efficient use.” The point being that the proposed reason for the merger is invalid. The detailed claims about AT&T being able to help itself expand were presented to the FCC yesterday. Sprint is also claiming that AT&T investing in this improvement “would cost far less than the $39 billion AT&T would spend to take over T-Mobile”. The response from AT&T:

“A company that has outsourced the management of its own network shouldn’t be giving advice to others”

AT&T's shot at Sprint’s previous decisions doesn't deny that Sprint might be right. Sprint is trying not to end up dead last in a very competitive market and this is their greatest motivation to put valuable resources into preventing the merger. If Sprint is right, it would prove that AT&T’s purpose is to simply control a larger portion of the market and thus minimize competition, which is the issue most have with the merger. If AT&T wants to claim market share is not a reason for the merger, they would have to present a logical argument for the reasons a company would not save money and legal hassle by just investing in their own expansion.