T-Mobile and Sprint on Tuesday filed for approval at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), laying the groundwork for a $26 billion merger.
“This filing is an important part of the process and lays out in depth how the public will benefit from the merger. And – spoiler alert – there’s a ton of consumer benefit in this deal,” claimed T-Mobile CEO John Legere in a blog post on Tuesday.
“T-Mobile and Sprint coming together lays the foundation for the U.S. to continue its global technology leadership well into the 5G era… and in so doing, will spur Verizon and AT&T to invest in a huge capacity increase that will drive down the price per gigabyte across the entire industry,” said Legere.
Further stating why this merger would be a good idea, Legere said “5G is a massive inflection point in the user experience. At full deployment the New T-Mobile will deliver fiber-like speeds. I’m talking about average speeds at a blazing 444 Mbps, covering about two-thirds of the country, with jaw-dropping peak speeds up to 4.1 Gbps!! And you won’t have to wait long to see these amazing increases in speed and performance. By 2021 our engineers are planning to deliver 5G speeds 5X faster than the LTE speeds being delivered on the nation’s fastest LTE network today… that is of course the T Mobile network.”
Democrats and consumer groups are concerned that this proposed merger would be one step further toward monopoly in the already tight communications market, whittling down the choice or wireless provider from four to three.