T-Mobile stalls CPUC, FCC reviews of Sprint merger with cheap lawyer tricks

11 March 2019 by Steve Blum
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Getting a fast approval of its proposed takeover of Sprint from federal and state regulators is supposedly T-Mobile’s goal, but it’s not helping itself. Last week, its habit of stonewalling and waiting until the last minute to provide information to regulators reviewing the merger resulted in a three week (minimum) hold at the Federal Communications Commission and a demand from California Public Utilities Commission staff to turn over stacks of documents previously requested. That demand could also lead to a further delay in getting California’s blessing for the deal.

According to an FCC notice, the agency needs time to review new claims about the wonderfulness of the merger made by T-Mobile and get public feedback…

On February 21, 2019, and March 6, 2019, the Applicants filed significant additional information regarding their network integration plans for 2019–2021, an extension of their previously filed merger simulation analysis to cover the years 2019–2021, and additional information regarding their claims related to fixed wireless broadband services. These filings contain substantial new material and reach conclusions about the effects of the transaction that were not previously in the record.

As a result, the FCC added at least three weeks to its review, pausing its informal 180-day shot clock at 121 days, with a restart not scheduled until 4 April 2019 at the earliest.

One problem is that a key filing describing T-Mobile’s plans to offer in-home service is marked confidential, so the FCC won’t be getting much public comment on it.

The CPUC’s public advocates office (PAO) asked the administrative law judge (ALJ) managing the case to force T-Mobile to produce more data, to back up the claims made in a similar avalanche of data ahead of hearings last month. That dump and T-Mobile’s introduction of new claims, resulted in a four week delay. The PAO says that “in response to the Public Advocates Office’s Data Requests to T-Mobile…T-Mobile provided only objections and no substantively responsive answers. T-Mobile’s objections are unfounded and inappropriate”.

The back and forth argument over evidence is eating up the extra time added to the schedule by the ALJ. If that causes the problem, the obvious solution is to add even more time, something T-Mobile claims it doesn’t want to happen.

Alternating last minute data dumps with lawyerly foot dragging seems like a bad way of getting a quick decision from the CPUC and the FCC. If T-Mobile is really in the hurry it claims to be to get the Sprint deal approved, it needs to start playing nice with the other kids.

Collected documents, dumped and otherwise, from the CPUC’s review of the proposed merger of Sprint and T-Mobile are here.