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FCC Approves AT&T's $1.9 Billion Qualcomm Spectrum Purchase
An anonymous reader writes "Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has granted approval for AT&T to buy Qualcomm's wireless spectrum licenses for $1.925 billion. The FCC admitted to having some 'competitive concerns' about letting AT&T snap up such a large swath of spectrum licenses, but were satisfied by simply imposing a number of conditions to prohibit interference on neighboring bands. They also said the deal facilitates their goal of 'expanding mobile broadband deployment throughout the country.'"
At a guess, it means 1.925 billion dollars of hidden fees spread out across all the AT&T users.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"We had concerns about AT&T not competing, but when we realized how big the bribes they paid us and our appointing politicians were, we decided to let the deal go ahead anyways"
Frankly the spectrum is why AT&T wanted t-mobile in the first place, and since that deal fell through this is the next best thing for them.
Frankly I don't think that's true. Spectrum is what they need, but the dominant market position is what they want. The T-Mobile acquisition would have made them the largest carrier overnight for a paltry $30B and given them the spectrum they needed to boot, while this $1B deal gives them spectrum for less than the penalties on the T-Mobile deal falling through. I think it's a clear indication that spectrum was *not* the primary motivation for their attempted buyout, but we all knew that.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere