Dan Hesse Leads Sprint Opposition to AT&Tmo Acquisition [Sprint's Chief Executive Has A War Room, Personally Plotting Actions Against AT&T T-Mobile, Says Sprint Won't Be Able To Get Cool New Phones If Deal Allowed]

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It’s not really a big shock that Sprint is opposed to the AT&T-T-Mobile acquisition. They had issued a statement about five minutes after the deal was announced and they’ve been rallying against it in Washington with an army of lobbyists. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, who you may know from Sprint’s TV commercials, is personally leading the company’s war on the AT&Tmo deal. He isn’t a CEO calling the shots from his BlackBerry on his golf course. According to Bloomberg, Hesse is personally planning the company’s strategy against the acquisition from a corporate war room.

It’s called the “White Room” and Dan Hesse allegedly has the only key. According to an article with Bloomberg, in Sprint’s headquarters there’s a war room of sorts where there are white boards, charts, maps and other documents, filled with Hesse’s notes where the Sprint CEO plots the “war” against the AT&T-T-Mobile merger.

Hesse told Bloomberg:

Clearly, purely, we want to win and block the merger. This one poses real risks.

In addition to all the lobbyists who are courting the ears of politicians in Washington, Sprint has also filed a 377-page opinion with the FCC, bashing the AT&T-T-Mobile deal and why it’s bad for American telecommunications. Hesse has gotten 18 local State regulators to look into the deal, and he’s working on getting “top tech CEOs” to come out against the deal. Plus, Hesse says he has other secret weapons that haven’t been unveiled yet. The amount of time that Dan Hesse has spent on government affairs has tripled since the AT&T-T-Mobile acquisition was announced. Hesse, who’s a former AT&T executive himself, is obviously leading Sprint’s battle against the deal.

Why so opposed to the deal? Hesse makes it clear that without a T-Mobile (a fourth major carrier), Verizon and AT&T (both with over 100 million customers each) would become two heavyweights in the industry, and Sprint would be unable to compete with those two without the balance of a fourth major would provide. Although they by no means work together, T-Mobile and Sprint combined have roughly 80 million customers. That puts the two smaller majors on the same level of Verizon and AT&T and provides a nice dichotomy between the four of them.

In addition to the fear that customer prices would go up without T-Mobile, Hesse tells Bloomberg that it would create an uncompetitive situation for Sprint where they would be secure lucrative phones from the manufacturers to their network. So, bad all around for Sprint if this deal goes through – according to Sprint.

AT&T has said from the beginning that Sprint is overplaying the impact AT&T-T-Mobile would have on the telecommunications industry. They point to smaller acquisitions in the US telco space, like Verizon buying Alltel or AT&T buying Cingular. The sky didn’t fall with those acquisitions, but we at TFTS will let you make up your own mind if AT&T buying T-Mobile is bad for the wireless industry.

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