Dish gets Department of Justice support for 800 MHz extension

The Department of Justice (DoJ) supports Dish Network’s request for more time to buy 800 MHz spectrum licenses from T-Mobile but says seven more months is sufficient rather than the ten months that Dish had requested. In a September 18 filing with the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the DoJ said a modest extension of the deadline for Dish to acquire the spectrum licenses will serve the competition goals of the final judgment that enabled Sprint to merge with T-Mobile. The DoJ referred back to a 2013 petition that T-Mobile filed with the Federal Communications Commission when it came time to craft rules on the auction of 600 MHz spectrum licenses when T-Mobile argued that a carrier could cover more area and offer better in-building service using lower-band spectrum with fewer cell sites.