AT&T Reaches Out to Rivals for Sake of T-Mobile Merger

From DailyTech: Having recently learned that seven U.S. states joined the Department of Justice's (DOJ) effort to prevent the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, AT&T is now attempting to rescue its $39 billion deal by reaching out to smaller rivals like Sprint and MetroPCS.

AT&T announced its $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom AG in March 2011. Since then, AT&T has had trouble convincing the government that the merger would not kill competition and negatively affect consumers. On August 31, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against AT&T in an effort to terminate the deal, which it says would be anticompetitive.

Along the way, AT&T gained support from the Louisiana Public Service Commission as well as 11 state attorneys general, but also gained opposition from seven other U.S. states recently.

Now, AT&T is approaching smaller rivals in an effort to sell spectrum and subscribers, according to Bloomberg. Some of the rivals that AT&T reached out to were MetroPCS Communications, Leap Wireless International Inc., Sprint Nextel Corp., CenturyLink Inc. and Dish Network Corp.

Sprint filed an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T on September 6 to kill the merger, showing strong opposition to the deal that could kill competition such as itself.

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