T-Mobile/Verizon Wireless Spectrum Deal Good for Wireless Competition, Companies Tell FCC
A deal to get T-Mobile US the lower band spectrum it’s long sought doesn’t raise any competitive concerns and should be approved by the FCC, said T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless in a public interest statement filed Friday at the FCC and posted online Monday (http://bit.ly/1aie8ut). The deal was unveiled last week (CD Jan 7 p1). T-Mobile will pay Verizon $3.3 billion for 15 700 MHz A-block licenses. And the two agreed to a swap of full or partial licenses in the 700 MHz, AWS and PCS bands. The agreements are covered by nine applications filed by the carriers at the agency.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
"Because only spectrum is being assigned rather than any operating entities, the proposed transactions will not result in any reduction in the number of competitors in any market,” the filing said. “Instead, each Applicant will secure access to more contiguous spectrum with improved broadband capacity, which will allow each to provide improved and more competitive services to its customers. In addition, T-Mobile will be able to deploy LTE service more broadly and robustly than is currently possible with its existing spectrum holdings, and Verizon Wireless will be able to meet the growing broadband demands of its LTE customers in several geographic areas by increasing the capacity of its network in those areas."
T-Mobile plans to rapidly build out the areas covered by the 700 MHz licenses it’s acquiring, the two carriers said. “While deployment will be constrained by adjacent-channel television operations in some areas, T-Mobile has approximately 15,000 transmitter locations within the areas covered by the licenses, but outside of the Television Channel 51 service contours, where adjacent-channel interference concerns exist.” As a result of the agreement requiring interoperability of devices built for the lower 700 MHz band, “handsets are expected to be widely available in late 2014 to deploy services using this spectrum,” said the filing. “These factors and others will allow T-Mobile to commence build-out of the 700 MHz spectrum licenses involved in these transactions later this year in many areas."
The licenses Verizon Wireless will obtain through a swap also will make its operations more efficient, the filing said. “Verizon Wireless has previously explained that even with its continuing investment in significant network enhancements, its current spectrum holdings will not provide sufficient capacity to meet the growing demand for mobile broadband, 4G LTE in particular,” the filing said. “The spectrum covered by these license assignments will enable Verizon Wireless to add additional AWS and PCS capacity in a number of markets. In addition, the spectrum exchanges will allow Verizon Wireless to achieve the efficiency benefits associated with larger blocks of contiguous spectrum and the alignment of spectrum it holds in adjacent markets.”