Monday, June 03, 2019

More Momentum for New T-Mobile Following Hawaii Commission's Approval

It's been reported that Hawaii state regulators approved the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger. As it now stands, the proposed merger has received approval from 18 of the 19 purportedly required state public utility commissions (PUC). That leaves only California's PUC. To repeat what I wrote in a February blog post, California's PUC should promptly complete its review of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger.

Randolph May and I have described the potential 5G benefits of the pending deal in the Free State Foundation's initial public comments and other publications, including our Perspectives from FSF Scholars paper, "T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Offers Public Interest Benefits: Likely Presents a Fast Track to 5G." In that paper, we explained that the merger, if approved, would enable accelerate deployment of a nationwide 5G network. New T-Mobile would strongly challenge mobile wireless market leaders AT&T and Verizon, providing consumers and enterprises faster mobile broadband speeds, increased network data capacity, and lower per-megabit prices. 

Moreover, Sprint faces serious financial challenges. Absent the proposed merger, Sprint faces potentially significant future financial and competitive decline as a standalone provider. (See this blog post and FSF's reply comments for more on this point.)

Now that FCC approval of the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger (with conditions) has been signaled by Chairman Ajit Pai and two other commissioners, the U.S. Department of Justice ought to provide its approval, and soon. As FSF President May was quoted in TR Daily on May 19:
[W]ith the new commitments that T-Mobile/Sprint have now offered, the case for concluding there are public benefits from the merger has become even stronger. There is an imperative that the U.S. lead the world in the race to deploy 5G networks, the super-fast next-generation of wireless networks. And there is also an imperative that high-speed broadband be accessible more ubiquitously to rural Americans. The new T-Mobile-Sprint conditions should help the U.S. achieve both of those imperatives… I hope the FCC and the Department of Justice will move forward now with dispatch in completing their merger reviews.