T-Mobile's Broadband Broadside Against Dish Seen as Possible Merger-Opposition Payback

T-Mobile's broadside at Dish Network's IoT plans is likely at least partially payback for Dish's opposition to T-Mobile buying Sprint, experts told us. The timing of the wireless company's letter to FCC Wireless Bureau Chief Don Stockdale (see 1810260047) -- a month after Dish joined public interest and consumer groups and representatives of mostly rural carriers in opposition (see 1808280038) -- reads as "sour grapes retribution," said Gigi Sohn, Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy fellow. Dish fought back.

Spectrum licensees typically don't go after one another about their deployment or compliance with buildout obligations. Every company is going to be before the FCC asking for a deadline extension, so they don't want to make statements that later could come back to bite them, said a lawyer specializing in broadband competition. Dish is unlikely to back off T-Mobile/Sprint criticism, but the letter does make Dish spend time and resources dealing with it, dividing its attention, the lawyer said. The move also could hurt T-Mobile/Sprint because if the FCC either strips advanced wireless services spectrum from Dish or if Dish sells it on the secondary market, that makes the rationale for regulatory approval of the Sprint deal shakier since T-Mobile's midband spectrum needs can be met another way than in a merger, he said.

While merger opposition payback is plausible, T-Mobile also could be thinking the Sprint deal is more likely to be approved if there's more mobile competition, either from Dish accelerating its plans for a mobile broadband network or selling its spectrum, said spectrum consultant Tim Farrar. The latter would reduce pressure on T-Mobile to sell spectrum as a deal condition, he said.

Farrar said there are wide expectations the FCC will pressure Dish to speed up its mobile broadband network plans, so T-Mobile's letter gives the agency more fodder. T-Mobile and the FCC didn't comment.

Stockdale's letter to Dish in July seeking details about its network deployment plans (see 1807100062) raised eyebrows about what the bureau's posture might be, said a wireless consultant/lawyer with clients interested in Dish's mobile plans. T-Mobile's No. 1 policy objective with the FCC has consistently been getting its hands on as much spectrum as it can, and the Dish letter seems to read with it being seriously interested in that again, the lawyer said. While there might be some small component of dishing out a lick to Dish, T-Mobile wouldn't have gone to this trouble just for that end goal, he said.

Sohn said T-Mobile's arguments might not have a legal hook, since there's no precedent requiring Dish to build anything approaching what the wireless company says needs to be built and Dish has flexible use licenses that accommodate it building a full mobile broadband network sometime after its IoT network. She said with the White House's spectrum strategy paper mentioning IoT (see 181029004), it's not clear that what Dish is doing is tangential to administration goals.

Whether the FCC takes any action due to the T-Mobile letter is unclear, Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Phillip Berenbroick said. He said regardless of one’s opinion on whether Dish is spectrum warehousing, the issue points to the need for "use or share" requirements for any auctioned bands whereby unlicensed use is permitted as a matter of rule until operations commence in the band.

Dish said the T-Mobile letter, along with its proposed takeover of Sprint, "is another attempt to stifle competition." It said T-Mobile "has been well-aware" of its narrowband IoT plans since March 2017 and that since then, it and others also have announced similar narrowband IoT plans. "We welcome competition in this important category of wireless services," Dish said, saying it "remains committed to meeting the obligations of our FCC licenses, and has made good progress on our initial NB-IoT deployment. We also are excited about building the first stand-alone 5G network in the United States. Our 5G network will not be burdened by current legacy architecture. This will enable a more powerful and efficient use of spectrum, and launch new digital services that incumbent networks might find challenging."