T-MOBILE and Sprint Merger breaking news! Merger at critical risk! By Sneed Mobile Tech

What's going on guys, it is the SMT in today's news. I actually I mean, there's a lot of gravity to this. It's pretty heavy. I know a lot of you out. There are pro merger and there's probably tons of you out there that are anti-merger, but of course I mean, regardless of the situation of where you stand. This is huge news going either way you kind of look at it uh.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through all pieces of the news. Uh make sure you hear it all the way out before you jump to any conclusions uh. So here we go with the first piece, so one of the things that people have been asking about is what's been the situation with the FCC and clearing the merger from their side. It's generally thought that three out of five commissioners were cool with the merger. They were perfectly okay with it, and they were supporting it, and that is 100 true, but there has been one hold up the FCC in general, while it has been approving and been positive towards the merger.

There is a commissioner uh with the last name Carr, commissioner Carr, who is obviously expected to approve the merger, but he's been holding down some meetings very recently. I think, as recently as September 18th, so that dates back just one week ago now he's been meeting with chiefs of staff office officials. There have been potential questions regarding the network economic model of the new T-Mobile network and the merged company, the new T-Mobile. So it is expected that he would be voting pro merger, but there's been some kind of snafu going on and some additional, I guess, investigation and I think that's the key and where we're going with the second part of this announcement. So here's the big piece, so that was going on.

We had no IDE, no idea what was being talked about and discussed and what the hold up has been. But now it looks like we do know so. Here's the situation sprint is currently under investigation by the FCC. The reason they're being investigated is a misuse of money and funding in the amounts of millions of dollars. So this is no petty amount.

What we have is sprint is receiving subsidized dollars for low-income Americans and customers that were actually not served with these uh with these dollars. So the FCC chairman, AIT pie, has already spoked on this matter. He calls this careless disregard. Full investigation is coming, so you know, go ahead and file it uh. The sprint has failed to uh enroll, individual customers from the lifeline program and uh.

For those of you that aren't really aware of what the lifeline program is. It's a subsidy. That's designed to make cell phone service more affordable for people that you know qualify under low income standards. So after 30 days of inactivity on the lifeline program, you're supposed to be unenrolled and removed, it looks like it looks like sprint failed to do this for a lot of customers, we're hearing, 885 000 misuse cases, that's 30 percent of the lifeline program, so that's an incredible number and percentage anyways. This is a program that starting in 2016 at the time, commissioner wheeler for the FCC, was trying to de-emphasize and minimize how much funding was going into the lifeline program and one of the ways they were doing it is by removing fraud.

This would qualify as fraud, so the lifeline program uh, is a connectivity subsidy which costs I believe 9.25 is the design subsidy. The FCC has been trying to scale back the program for the last three or four years. You know we have a claim here of fraudulent activity and abuse of the program. From what I understand, 18.5 percent of payments are being classified as improper under this investigation, so this is a huge uh. Oh, this is, in my opinion, a big deal, so this is awful for merger optics, and I'm going to get to that now in the SMT analysis, so you got metro by T-Mobile who's, getting implicated in selling used phones as new phones by metro dealers, whether authorized dealers or whatever, and then you've got hidden charges, taxes and fees that are not being identified correctly.

All that's going on at metro! Now you have this. You cannot expect to get some kind of deal or a settlement with states that are blocking and trying to oppose, and you've got a lot of public outcries on it, and this type of stuff is going on so go ahead and throw in all that metro business from the last couple of weeks throw in this sprint issue with this FCC investigation. The merger is in huge trouble. It is completely jeopardized at this point, because this is complete ammunition for the opposition to the merger. The block is going to get really, really strong, and this is going to be one of their arguments.

You know they. They already have reservations about dish being a viable carrier. They already have reservations about saying that the competition in the market is going to be jeopardized. Now you throw in these types of credibility, issues and customer neglect or customer. Whatever else is going on with metro and sprint, I mean, is this neglect I mean I don't know, is it sprint wasn't paying attention? You know you can't really make that argument, because it's 885 000 cases, and it's probably going on for multiple months- is it abuse.

I mean the FCC seems to think so, and that's really all that matters because they're funding this is it incompetence from the case of sprint. That would have to be. The argument that sprint would make is that they were unaware of this going on, but there's just there's no way that's going to fly. I can't see that happening. This is going to go down as fraudulent.

This is going to go down as program abuse. Stealing this is thievery essentially because they were charging and getting the subsidized dollars for this and not providing the service. I want to know from you guys in the comment section below how much do you think this implicates the merger you've heard my opinion. I want to hear what you guys have to say. This is a big uh.

Oh, I mean worst case scenario. T-Mobile may have to pull out of this deal, and literally this could just be the icing on the cake. It might just be the kind of the tip of the iceberg. I don't know if it's going to get worse in terms of this investigation, but I can tell you right now: things are not looking good for the merger. This is bad optics.

This looks really, really bad. You guys give me your take I'd, love to hear the thoughts and the opinions of the SMT nation. So go ahead and drop me a line in the comment section below anyways we're going live tonight, I'll be doing a video uh we'll do a podcast we'll talk about this join us uh. You know we'll, we'll be talking about it. So who knows? Maybe we'll have some guests on so go ahead and check us out make sure you subscribe to the channel make sure your bell notified.

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I am the SMT, and we'll see you guys on the next one. Peace.

Source : Sneed Mobile Tech