Months after AT&T announced they wanted to buy the second largest cell carrier in the United States, the deal is still not 100% done. Regulators have been watching this deal very closely, legislators have been asking tough questions, but today, it appears that AT&T has a couple of companies on their side. Companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Oracle, Facebook and RIM have all decided to get behind AT&T and want to see the deal finalized. One of the largest companies that is not on the list of AT&T allies is Google, at least for now.
There are also a couple of venture capital firms that have spoken on AT&T’s side as well. Even with all of the questioning from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, all of these companies want to see the deal go through. AT&T is getting a lot support and it’s also coming in the way of public support. The public is very interested in this deal and there has been plenty of communications with the FCC about such interest. There is very little reason at this point that anyone has found why AT&T should not purchase T-Mobile and become the largest cell carrier in the United States.
The silence that is coming from Google is still somewhat suspicious, but you never know why that might be. Google might see the deal as a killer for an already customer “non-service” company like AT&T, which would feel a pinch with all of T-Mobiles subscribers. Google might also just be waiting in the dark for a chance to take advantage of a deal like this. Another company that really hasn’t said much is Apple. The company that is always about being secret has unsurprising said anything about the potential deal. It might have more to do with the fact that Apple is concentrating on other products right now.
Right now, Sprint is a major company that does not support the deal and has said exactly that. Sprint wants to see the number of cell carriers stay at four, instead of drop to three, because if there were only three, over 80 percent of the market would be controlled by the top two companies. Verizon and AT&T would have the largest part of the market, which would slowly move Sprint out of the running, or at least make them valuable a company to purchase.
