T-Mobile has indicated via fillings with the Federal Communications Commission their intent to persuade the government to block Verizon Wireless from acquiring spectrum from a number of cable companies. In the last few months Verizon has finalized deals to acquire spectrum from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Cox Communications. T-Mobile argues that the Verizon deal would place an “excessive concentration” of wireless spectrum in the hands of one of the nations largest carriers.
Coincidentally, the spectrum Verizon is attempting to purchase from the cable companies falls in the AWS band, the very same Frequency T-Mobile uses for their 4G network. T-Mobile argues in their statement is unlikely Verizon will see any near-term benefits considering the company already holds AWS spectrum they have yet to put to use.
“The Transactions come before the Commission at a critical time for the future of competition in mobile services, and particularly in mobile broadband. Verizon Wireless, with its extensive holdings of valuable low-frequency spectrum, already has a significant advantage in the industry migration to LTE as the new wireless broadband standard. Its smaller competitors do not have excess spectrum in which to first warehouse bandwidth and later deploy LTE. With current spectrum holdings, their effort to deploy LTE is more complicated, costly and time consuming. Moreover, its smaller competitors are largely relegated to the higher frequency ranges, which are more difficult to deploy due to their propagation and building penetration characteristics, and their ability to keep up with demand as the industry evolves to the LTE standard will be significantly capacity constrained, to the detriment of competition. “
T-Mobile doesn’t hold back as they also state that smaller competitors, such as themselves are better suited to acquire this AWS spectrum as they could put it to use “…quickly, more intensively, and more efficiently than Verizon Wireless.”
It’s an interesting read and you should catch the bottom of page 19 as our own Neal Gompa, better known to the rest of us as TmoNews’ resident spectrum guru Conan Kudo finds his ExtremeTech article cited inside T-Mobile’s FCC filing.