The New York Times reports:

AT&T said late on Monday afternoon that it had withdrawn its $39 billion takeover bid for T-Mobile USA, acknowledging that it could not overcome opposition from the Obama administration to creating the nation’s biggest cellphone service provider.

The company said in a statement that it would continue to invest in wireless spectrum, but could not overcome opposition by both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. It added that American wireless customers “will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled” by the regulators’ decisions.

I’m going to have to disagree with AT&T: This is great news for cell phone users. It’s nice to see the U.S. Government stretching some of those anti-monopoly muscles. Let’s hope this is just the appetizer for some new consumer-protection measures from the Justice Department and the FCC in the near future.

11 replies on “AT&T Leaves T-Mobile at the Altar”

  2. Great news for cell phone users would be if the government required interoperability between the different networks. I should be able to by a phone and put it on any network.

  3. @1: yup. I give ’em 3 years at most. They aren’t moving to LTE and they have insane customer and executive turnover.

    That was $4 billion well-spent, AT&T…

  5. “acknowledging that it could not overcome opposition from the Obama administration to creating the nation’s biggest cellphone service provider.”

    It wasn’t administration opposition, it was CUSTOMER OPPOSITION. Fuck AT&T in the face.

  6. @2: But that’s what socialist Europe did! Capitalist America would never stand for that level of government intervention.

    More seriously, the industry is slowly standardizing on LTE, which means we’ll finally have one standard. It’s crazy that we’ve had to wait this long for interoperability, but at least we’re getting it.

  7. @1: “I mostly agree that this is good news . . . at least until T-Mo folds. Which probably won’t be too much longer.”

    Yeah, it’s good for America, but T-Mobile seems to have little interest in US infrastructure and will continue looking for a suitor.

  9. @aleks

    Yes, they’re standardizing on LTE, but the LTE is not interoperable. The government needs to force this.

    @laterite

    HSPA+ is just find for 99% of what you need to do on mobile. Verizon though had to move to LTE because EVDO is not fast enough. Plus, as part of the agreement T-Mobile and AT&T are going to share spectrum, so I expect T-Mobile would be just fine. However, Deutsche Telekom wants to sell T-Mobile in the worst way. Sprint doesn’t have the capital to buy them, so I’m not sure what is going to happen.

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