AT&T agreed to acquire T-Mobile yesterday afternoon. A lot of people are having a very difficult time seeing the upside of the deal. While AT&T is explaining it as a way for them to increase their coverage, as well as LTE reach, most see it as a Ma-Bell type move.
Frankly put, we see it as a big company getting bigger, and the competition pool drying up.
AT&T must be feeling the heat a little bit, because Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, sent out an email to all of AT&T’s employees this morning.
Here it is in its entirety,
From: Randall Stephenson CEO
Date: March 20, 2011 8:38:15 AM HST
Subject: AT&T agrees to acquire T-Mobile USA
Reply-To: <newsnow@att.com>AT&T agrees to acquire T-Mobile USA
Team:
I am pleased to tell you that today AT&T and Deutsche Telekom announced that we’ve agreed to acquire T-Mobile USA. The details are laid out in our announcement materials (links below), but I wanted you to have some additional background on why this transaction is important.
Thanks to your great work, AT&T has led the world driving the mobile broadband revolution. Over the past four years, mobile data traffic on our network increased 8,000 percent. And over the next five years, we expect volumes will increase eight to 10 times from where they are today, as customers mobilize everything with tablets, mobile video, mobile computing, the cloud and more.
This transaction will combine spectrum and network assets in an optimal fashion to help us meet the capacity requirements for this new world.
• It will help us improve network quality for customers of both companies.
• We’ll commit to deploy advanced LTE capabilities to 95 percent of the U.S. population.
• And T-Mobile’s subscribers will now have a path to LTE, which they did not have before.
All of this creates a stronger platform for new services, which will benefit customers and improve our long-term growth potential.
I also hope you take pride in the fact that this transaction represents a major commitment by our company to advance America’s leadership in mobile broadband, which is a key enabling technology for our nation’s high-tech growth. Over the next year, this proposed transaction will move through a thorough review process at the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice. We will work promptly and diligently to assist in these reviews and we are confident in approvals.
In the meantime, we remain separate companies competing independently and vigorously in all markets. I ask that you keep your focus, compete hard and do what AT&T people do best – delivering a great experience for customers.
Thank you for all you do every day to make AT&T successful, and I hope you share in my excitement about our company’s future.
Randall
Thanks for the Tip bikr!
