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Back in August, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held an auction for its 2.5GHz spectrum license. This was awarded to T-Mobile, who won the auction after paying most of the $428 million raised by the Commission. Despite this, AT&T seems to be blocking this win by arguing that the FCC should deny this application “to avoid harm to competition and public interest.”
With T-Mo’s acquisition of Sprint, it already has a huge lead in the band. And its newly acquired 2.5GHz spectrum will only do more damage as insisted by AT&T. The wireless carrier already filed a petition urging the FCC to implement a spectrum screen on the mid-band frequencies, especially those that T-Mo already owns. And as reported by Fierce Wireless, AT&T is requesting this petition be revisited by the FCC.
In its November 7 filing, AT&T said:
“The 2.5 GHz auction has come and gone, and T-Mobile predictably emerged as the easy winner. With this long-form application, it is poised to win 90% of the available 2.5 GHz licenses for $304 million—orders of magnitude below the bid levels in prior, competitively neutral auctions—and perfect its long-term strategy to keep its competitors from closing the mid-band spectrum gap.”
T-Mobile has responded to AT&T’s request by saying it is “plainly a calculated attempt to impede competition. The petition absurdly boils down to a claim that T-Mobile paid too little for spectrum as part of a plan to make AT&T pay too much. There is no plausible foreclosure strategy at work in an auction where the total amount of T-Mobile’s winning bids is small in scale ($304 million) compared to rival’s investment plans ($24 billion in 2022), and AT&T sat out the auction.”
T-Mobile calls this a delay tactic from AT&T to deploy its 2.5GHz spectrum that will provide network to its Home Internet service, especially in rural areas.
You can read more about the report here.
Source: Fierce Wireless
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