FCC Approves AT&T's $1.9 Billion Qualcomm Spectrum Purchase 52
An anonymous reader writes "Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has granted approval for AT&T to buy Qualcomm's wireless spectrum licenses for $1.925 billion. The FCC admitted to having some 'competitive concerns' about letting AT&T snap up such a large swath of spectrum licenses, but were satisfied by simply imposing a number of conditions to prohibit interference on neighboring bands. They also said the deal facilitates their goal of 'expanding mobile broadband deployment throughout the country.'"
Re:So... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want cheap wireless, you're not using one of the big 4 companies anyways. If you want better coverage, well voice coverage is probably already about as good as it's gonna get, the costs to provide coverage to the 1% of people who aren't already saturated are proportunately not worth the return, and Data coverage is more focused on providing faster speeds in key markets with LTE than providing even '3g' speeds in the fringe areas where it's not saturated.
Frankly the spectrum is why AT&T wanted t-mobile in the first place, and since that deal fell through this is the next best thing for them.
Re:AT&T & CDMA? (Score:4, Interesting)
The spectrum was called MediaFLO, owned by Qualcomm to deploy digital TV. ATT will be repurposing it for LTE (4G) only, which is the same technology used by both CDMA or GSM carriers as their next generation technology. In 4G (real 4g, not the marketing 3G+ stuff) all carriers are using the same technology.
This means with 4g, US may get phone compatibility from different carriers finally. It might take them a while, though, as LTE only phones wouldn't exist for another 5-6 years.