In general, Sprint and T-Mobile may be hoping for a more favorable hearing from regulators this time around.
This past fall, the FCC approved a report that said the mobile wireless industry has “effective competition.”
“Most reasonable people see a fiercely competitive marketplace,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said. “To those who want to impose more regulation upon the wireless marketplace, the reality of effective competition is an inconvenient truth.”
Responding to the same report, however, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, however, mentioned the possibility of a merger between two of the major companies.
“Any transaction before us will require someone to explain how consumers will benefit, how prices will not rise, and how innovation will not dissipate in the face of so much more industry concentration,” she said.
NPR’s Alina Selyukh has noted that it’s not clear how consumers would be affected by a Sprint/T-Mobile merger.
“Consumer advocates have criticized [such a] merger, pointing to the declines in the cost of service since a merger was shot down in 2014,” she wrote last fall. “In May [2017], when rumors surfaced of a new attempt to combine the carriers, the former FCC chairman and former antitrust chief from the Obama administration penned a column that warned that prices would rise if a fourth player disappeared.”
“Absorbing Sprint, T-Mobile would take on a messy network and debt,” Alina writes. “But combined, the two would rise into a No. 3 much closer to AT&T and Verizon in terms of the overall number of subscribers.”
Article Appeared @https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/29/606900032/t-mobile-sprint-announce-a-plan-for-merger