Last updated April 12, 2019
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and senior vice president of government affairs Vonya McCann are not impressed by the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile and are saying that the company intends to fight in the courts to prevent it from actually happening, but does he have a leg to stand on? Hesse reckons the merger will hurt consumers by reducing competition and certainly, Sprint makes some good points in their official statement on the matter. This was released yesterday; pointing out that the merger gives the two cell phone companies, who are already undoubtedly the biggest wireless providers, an almost unprecedented level of control over backhaul, pricing, and products. They also argued that such a move undoes a quarter of a century of legislation geared to prevent such a monopoly, but will it be enough to actually convince a judge to stop the merger from happening?
We really don’t think so. The fact that AT&T are making such a noise about how they intend to make LTE coverage available over 95 per cent of the United States makes it seem pretty unlikely to us that the government will step in and stop it from happening. They may receive a few piecemeal concessions out of AT&T to make it look like they’re doing something, but at the end of the day our money is on this deal going through with everybody feeling pretty happy about it. Well, everybody except Sprint and Dan Hesse, that is.