A Republican lawmaker this week urged agency heads considering the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile not to be swayed by the strong opposition voiced by his colleagues across the aisle.
In urging the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission to reject the deal, Senators Herb Kohl and Al Franken provided officials "with only one side of the story," Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas wrote in a Monday letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FCC chairman Julius Genachowski.
In recent weeks, Kohl and Franken have written separate letters to Holder and Genachowski, urging them to reject the deal because, they argued, it is dangerous to competition and consumers. Kohl in particular said a May 11 Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing, which he chaired, helped solidify his opinion about the deal. Franken, who is also a member of the subcommittee, voiced similar thoughts in his letter.
Smith, who attended a May 11 House Judiciary hearing on the merger, argued that "a congressional hearing does not provide an adequate forum for the extensive and detail analysis that a merger of this magnitude warrants."
Final determinations, Smith said, should be left to agencies with the "expertise and the time to thoroughly study all the evidence of the merger's likely effects, including non-public evidence unavailable to Congress."
Though Smith did not issue his support for the merger outright, he did urge the DOJ and FCC to consider several points he believed were not represented in the Kohl and Franken letters, including AT&T's promise to: improve the quality and capacity of its broadband network, which it said will create jobs; more efficiently use its spectrum; expand its LTE network to 97 percent of Americans; and provide better service to customers, incentivizing rivals to also improve.
"These benefits of the merger, if they come to pass, could improve mobile service for any constituents and others throughout the nation," Smith argued.
In his letter, Kohl suggested that AT&T's LTE claims are "plainly too speculative." He urged the carrier to spend the $39 billion it will shell out for T-Mobile on network improvements.
Franken was also skeptical about AT&T's spectrum claims. "The question your agencies must consider is not how badly AT&T needs the spectrum, but how effective AT&T would be at making use of that spectrum relative to other carrier," he wrote.
"Congress has a legitimate role to play," Smith concluded, but the decision is ultimately with the agencies. He urged a "fair and thorough process."
For more, see A Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Is a Bad Idea, But Here's How It Could Work and PCMag mobile analyst Sascha Segan's letter to the FCC about the pending deal.