Some analysts still seem to think Ergen could pull it off. ?There is no financing to build a telecom network.” ?I think whatever rosy projections Charlie had are now very questionable,? said a source who expected to be part Dish?s lending group. “Ergen, the billionaire chairman of satellite-TV company Dish Network, needs to raise about $10 billion to build a 5G network that covers 70 percent of the US population by June 2023, fulfilling his part of a regulatory agreement that allowed Sprint to be acquired by T-Mobile on April 1.īut with the coronavirus wreaking havoc on the economy and drying up lending, Wall Street is predicting Ergen will fall behind ? fast. The complaints are largely coming from unsourced Wall Street insiders, but they’re certainly right that funding the T-Mobile merger’s deus ex machina just got notably more complicated: Reports now indicate that the pandemic and quarantine may have scuttled Dish’s plans for financing and deployment, even if Ergen hadn’t been bluffing. Three, the current FCC has yet to stand up to industry on a single issue of substance, would never engage in the kind of nannying required to usher Dish’s plan from pipe dream to major network.īut with the pandemic, it’s not even clear we’re going to get to that part of the program.
Two, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are all heavily incentivized to make sure this proposal never got off the ground. He’d been accused (including by T-Mobile previously) of simply hoarding valuable spectrum and stringing along feckless, captured regulators for years with an eye on cashing out once the spectrum’s value had appreciated. One, Dish (and CEO Charlie Ergen) have a long history of empty promises in wireless. As we noted at the time there was very little chance this plan was ever going to work. Both agencies, and the vocal chorus of telecom-linked industry allies, all behaved as if all of this was perfectly legitimate and not grotesquely corrupt.Īt the heart of the DOJ’s approval was a flimsy proposal that involved giving Dish Network some T-Mobile spectrum in the hopes that, over even years, they’d be able to build out a replacement fourth carrier. And the DOJ not only ignored the recommendations of its staff, but DOJ “antitrust” boss Makan Delrahim personally helped guide the deal’s approval process via personal phone and email accounts. Instead, the Trump FCC rubber stamped the deal before even seeing impact studies. consumers already pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world, most objective experts recommended that the deal be blocked. Data from around the globe clearly shows that the elimination of one of just four major competitors results in layoffs and higher prices due to less competition. If you recall, the biggest downside of the $26 billion Sprint T-Mobile merger was the fact that the deal would dramatically reduce overall competition in the U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
