America-based wireless carrier AT&T is still fuming over the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to reject the merger with T-Mobile. Randall Stephenson, CEO, AT&T, has lashed out saying that the FCC has made it abundantly clear that they will not allow significant M&A to help bridge these delays in clearing up new spectrum.
He said that that the primary issue for the company continues to be spectrum, and in the absence of options operators have taken the logical step to make smaller transactions to acquire the spectrum required to meet demand. However, he added, that even the smallest and most routine spectrum deals are receiving intense scrutiny from this FCC, often times taking up to a year and sometimes longer for these to be approved.
Stephenson also said that in such a capacity-constrained environment they will manage usage-based data plans, increased pricing and manage the speeds of the highest volume users, as these are all logical and necessary steps to manage utilization.
He added that the deployment of LTE does give them a 30-40 percent lift in network efficiency, but at current growth rates that equates to only a year’s growth in traffic. Thus, LTE is important but it is not the silver bullet in terms of capacity planning, and so they need to continue with their spectrum push in order to meet customer demand.
