FCC pauses T-Mobile and Sprint merger

According to CNBC, the FCC sent a letter to T-Mobile and Sprint on Tuesday saying it needed more time to review their proposed merger.

According to the letter, the Federal Communications Commission is pausing the "informal 180-day" clock, which will allow staff and third parties to thoroughly review the documents that have just been submitted.

T-Mobile and Sprint announced a $ 26 billion merger agreement in April that would bring together the third and fourth wireless service providers in the United States. The two tried twice before merging in 2014 and 2017. The first time the regulators wanted to keep four national competitors. The second time, the parent companies could not agree on the control of each party.

The companies are trying to merge again because Verizon and AT & T are much larger than any of these companies. They must combine their strengths to become a stronger competitor. T-Mobile and Sprint also filed their statement of public interest with the FCC in June, arguing that the merger would better deploy 5G networks nationwide.

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As stated in the letter from the FCC, the agency wants to better understand the effects of the merger. The network engineering model submitted on September 5 is "considerably larger and more complex than the engineering submissions already in the file", and two other submissions regarding T-Mobile's business and economic models have also need to be revised.

The FCC refused to comment beyond the letter.

"The additional review time is common to the FCC merger reviews and we have recently provided a large amount of data to the FCC, which they want enough time to evaluate," said a spokesman for the FCC. -Mobile in an email. "We are confident that this transaction is competitive, good for the country and good for US consumers, and we look forward to continuing to work with the FCC to evaluate our projects."

Sprint did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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