AT&T & T-Mobile Deal Finally Proposed To FCC [AT&T Officially Submits The AT&Tmo Deal To The US Government For Regulatory Approval]

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AT&T announced their intentions to purchase T-Mobile US from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion sometime ago, but they had yet to officially file for regulatory approval from the US government. Now, they have. This past Thursday, AT&T announced their intention to buy the carrier in the deal that would see them become the largest wireless carrier in the United States.

Nothing new from the filing, but what’s interesting to note is that AT&T has increasing the percentage of Americans they say will now be covered by 4G LTE. Remember that AT&T is buying T-Mobile US for their holdings in the AWS spectrum band, which will help them in their 4G LTE network buildout. They had said that with the combined AT&T-T-Mobile network, they can cover 95% of Americans. Now, in their FCC filing, they can commit to 97.3% of Americans being covered by 4G.

Why is that a big deal? Increasing internet access to rural areas is one of President Obama’s goals (see this year’s State of the Union address). 4G has been, for a while actually, suggested as a fix to the dreaded “last mile” in rural communications. In our opinion, AT&T is trying to woo the FCC by mentioning that they can bring 4G to tons and tons of Americans.

AT&T also mentioned that all the smartphone and tablets are seriously hampering their network – as anybody with an iPhone in major metro markets will tell you – but should the deal go through, AT&T says they can integrate the networks and boost their capacity.

Obviously, the FCC needs to decide if this deal is good for the American consumer, hence AT&T trying to tell them how great everything will be once they get their way. I’m sticking with my original belief that this deal will go through after the FCC makes AT&T sell some network coverage in areas where their and T-Mobile’s network overlap. That’s what happened when Verizon bought Alltel, and seems to be the par for the course for these big telco deals.

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