An Engineer’s View of the Department of Justice’s T-Mobile/Sprint/DISH Strategy

To address the loss of a mobile communications competitor that will result from the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has proposed a solution that seeks to enable DISH Network to emerge as a fourth national facilities-based wireless carrier. From an engineering perspective, however, DOJ’s approach to enabling DISH’s deployment is not guaranteed to prove adequate to maintain competition comparable to that currently offered over Sprint’s network. DOJ’s preliminary announcement raises a host of unanswered technical questions and, from what we know now, DOJ’s proposed solution would require years to enable DISH to develop capacity and coverage on par with what Sprint has today—with no guarantee that the proposed solution would be successful. The approach also is overly optimistic about the execution of the DISH buildout and assumes a level of coordination and cooperation among competitors that is beyond anything previously observed in the US wireless industry. Taken together, these questions raise doubt about whether DOJ’s solution will really serve as a technically effective means to enable a fourth mobile competitor.

[Andrew Afflerbach (Ph.D., P.E.) is CTO of CTC Technology & Energy. He specializes in the planning, design, and implementation of communications infrastructure and networks.]