Ownership

Members of Congress are fed up with the state of cellphone coverage in the United States and they weren’t afraid to lodge their complaints personally — with the leaders of some of the country’s biggest wireless networks. As Sprint and T-Mobile went to Capitol Hill to defend their $26 billion proposed merger, lawmakers buttonholed T-Mobile’s chief executive, John Legere, and Sprint’s executive chairman, Marcelo Claure, on the frustrating inability to get a cell signal in many parts of the country, particularly in rural areas.

The major takeway from the House Communications Subcommittee hearing on the proposed T-Mobile-Sprint merger was that regulators are having to reconcile wildly divergent views of the impact of the deal. According to the various witnesses at the hearing on the deal:

In Jan 2018, T-Mobile completed its acquisition of a small Midwestern telecommunications company, Iowa Wireless Services (iWireless). While the company only provided service to 75,000 customers, many of its users had no other options. The service was precisely what rural communications advocates have asked for: affordable, effective, and accessible.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and eight of his colleagues sent letters to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Department of Justice Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim asking that they strike down a proposed merger deal between T-Mobile and Sprint. “Our enforcement officials are the last line of defense preventing reconsolidation of our telecommunications markets at the expense of American consumers,” the senators wrote.

In January 2018, T-Mobile acquired Iowa Wireless Services (iWireless), a regional carrier that provided postpaid and prepaid wireless service to approximately 75,000 customers in Iowa, western Illinois, and eastern Nebraska. Prior to the acquisition, iWireless had one of the largest retail footprints of any wireless carrier in Iowa, with 129 corporate and authorized dealer locations. iWireless was notable for its rural presence and for its affordable and flexible prepaid plans.

A Q&A with House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI). 

To show how the major US carriers fared in the second half of 2018 across all the spaces in which you use your smartphone, we’re offering our semi-annual three-part series of complementary special reports on mobile performance in the US.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere and Sprint executive chairman Marcelo Claure will pitch their companies' $26 billion merger before Congress, hoping to ease lawmaker's concerns about wireless competition while pushing the tie-up as a key part of the nation's 5G quest. It's a key test for a deal that would reduce the number of major national wireless carriers from four to three. The deal's opponents are fighting an uphill battle against a generally business-friendly administration, but the upcoming hearings let them air their concerns and turn up the heat.