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T-Mobile Apparently Lied To Government To Get Sprint Merger Approval, Ruling Says (arstechnica.com) 59

T-Mobile is having a rough week -- and it's only Monday. Earlier today, the company confirmed hackers gained access to the telecom giant's systems. Now, Ars Technica is reporting that the carrier "apparently lied to government regulators about its 3G shutdown plans in order to win approval of its merger with Sprint." From the report: The ruling [in a proceeding in front of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC)] issued Friday ordered T-Mobile "to show cause why it should not be sanctioned by the commission for violating" a CPUC rule with "false, misleading, or omitted statements." T-Mobile won approval for its 2020 acquisition of Sprint in part by agreeing to sell Sprint's Boost Mobile prepaid business and other assets to Dish, which is building its own 5G network and reselling capacity from other networks. T-Mobile agreed to make its 4G LTE and 3G CDMA networks available to Dish customers during a three-year transition period from 2020 to 2023, the CPUC ruling said. But T-Mobile now plans to stop providing CDMA network services nationwide on January 1, 2022, and Dish has urged government regulators to force T-Mobile to live up to its commitments.

T-Mobile's false and misleading statements under oath indicated, among other things, that T-Mobile would make its CDMA network "available to Boost customers until they were migrated to Dish Network Corporation's LTE or 5G services" and that Dish would have up to three years to complete the migration, the ruling said. The CPUC can impose penalties against T-Mobile of up to $100,000 for each offense.

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T-Mobile Apparently Lied To Government To Get Sprint Merger Approval, Ruling Says

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  • They were government hackers to skirt due process prove me wrong
  • lol fines (Score:5, Funny)

    by cygnusvis ( 6168614 ) on Monday August 16, 2021 @09:15PM (#61699315)
    Imagine you have 10 bil in the bank and you get fined a couple hundred thousand, and pass the cost onto the customer anyway
    • Re:lol fines (Score:5, Insightful)

      by yagmot ( 7519124 ) on Monday August 16, 2021 @10:21PM (#61699501)

      I'd rather imagine a world where regulators impose fines consisting of double-digit percentages of revenues with the stipulation that those costs can not be passed on to the customer.

      • If there is enough competition, you cannot pass anything to consumers. The idea is to make sure it is not an oligopoly.
      • "with the stipulation that those costs can not be passed on to the customer"

        How do you regulate and/or enforce that? One way or the other, costs have to be paid and revenue ultimately comes from the consumer.

        • by yagmot ( 7519124 )

          Freeze rates for services and products until the fines are paid. Figure out the current profit margins and allow for price changes that fluctuate with the market. It'd be up to the penalized company to provide all the compliance data, of course. We were already well into fantasy territory with the fines that hurt part lol

    • The bigger problem is that if an anti-trust action is taken against them, these fines are evidence.

    • Imagine if that fine applies per affected customer and there are millions of customers.

    • Well, unless that means $100,000 per affected subscriber. Then, it starts to add up.

  • Government say "No fair" after T-Mobile uses subterfuge against government's use of subterfuge.
  • by CrappySnackPlane ( 7852536 ) on Monday August 16, 2021 @09:39PM (#61699383)

    That's very almost nearly the average annual compensation of an individual T-Mobile employee [comparably.com]! And per offense, too! Boy, if I was a T-Mobile executive I sure wouldn't be sleeping easy on my yacht tonight - I bet the rest of corporate America will notice this and realize once and for all that the government isn't to be trifled with! Looks like the age of bullshit consolidation mergers is well and truly behind us now!

    • by Anonymous Coward
      The interesting bit is what "$100000 for each offense" means. If it's for each promise broken, it's just noise. If it is for each affected customer, cell tower etc it's a completely different ballgame.
    • Don't forget some of these laws were written a century ago. So bank breaking punishments of the 1920s are meal expenses to todays corporations.

      • Irrelevant, if the laws weren't designed to scale by being a percentage of business, or the gross profits from an illegal action, then the laws are shit laws and making excuses for them is weak. (Just like how the minimum wage law should have been tied to cost of living, inflation, or some similar number...)

        • by cusco ( 717999 )

          Minimum wage WAS tied to the cost of living, until Ronnie Raygun and David Stockman "fixed" the economy by changing the way measurements were made. Turns out that if you don't include food, fuel, housing, and medical costs the rate of inflation drops, and if you toss the continually dropping cost of electronics in that makes number even better. Once they convinced Congress that there was no inflation it was an easy sidestep to unlinking the minimum wage and cost of living. I lived on minimum wage for yea

  • This time they better dish out real punishment to the CEO, or I'm gonna key a random beemer.

  • by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Monday August 16, 2021 @10:09PM (#61699463)

    Why don't we have jail time on the table? Either the entire C-Suite can surrender themselves to a CA state prison and each of them can serve out the full sentence against the company, or the state can just confiscate 100% of their profits in lieu of incarceration. Let's see how valuable those stock options are when investors know that, no matter what, there will be zero profits for 5-10 years because California will be confiscating it all, and that also means no bonuses for any executives. It might actually force them to become a better company that focuses on long-term sustainability instead of meeting the next quarterly projections.

    • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      Why don't we have jail time on the table?

      I've been bitch'n about this for years. You see, cooperate law protects them from being tossed in a cage. That is unless the public is really pissed off then someone goes to jail. Otherwise, slap on the wrist, fine, and business as usual.

      If more cooperate fat cats spent some real prison time then things would be a lot different.

      • Even if the public is really pissed, no jail time. All the big bank bailouts a decade or so ago and there was no jail time for any of them, right?

        Now, China gives life sentences for shit like this. it's one area, their justice system is good. but this goes back to your point about public outrage.

        • And yet China's fraud situation is comically terrible.

          There's an old adage about pickpockets working the hangings in London... where they were hanging pickpockets. It's not the severity of the punishment, it's the chances of being punished.

          Generally that would mean effective enforcement, but the current punishment situation is really not punishment at all. So the chances, currently, are zero.

          I agree that these parasites should go to jail. But just imposing fines on corporate leadership would probably do

          • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

            I agree that these parasites should go to jail. But just imposing fines on corporate leadership would probably do it.

            No, I dont' agree that just fining corporate leadership would do anything. Most of these fat cats are making millions a year with hundreds of millions, or billions, stashed in banks all around the world. Strapping a fine of them of a few tens, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars really isn't going to do much. Most of them will just laugh it off, pay it, and business as usual.

            The reason they fine the companies, which doesn't work, is because that should get passed on to share holders who

          • I honestly don't think there is anyway to legitimately estimate fraud. If you look up online attempts to measure fraud based on reporting, China is actually pretty low but I bet we both agree those are a joke.

            So the question is can we come up with any decent standard measure of fraud? Which seems to me to come down to the difference between Guanxi vs Lobbyism. In China there is Guanxi but we have a parallel idiom in English, "It’s not what you know, but who you know" and likewise this concept can be v

    • Why don't we have jail time on the table?

      Every country that does that, it ends up being the businesses that didn't donate to the right politicians who end up in jail.

      It's a nice idea, but our society isn't orderly enough for it to work.

    • The supreme court says corporations are people. How does that saying go?

      I believe corporations are people as soon as Texas executes one.

    • "each of them can serve out the full sentence against the company"

      That's already happened. That's because there are no jail terms for corporations that break the law.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday August 16, 2021 @10:16PM (#61699481)
    It was stupidly obvious. Mergers have been getting rubber stamped for about 20 years now. Don't get mad, get even. Show up to vote at your primary election, and Google the candidates. There has been at least one completely non corrupt candidate in every primary election I voted in the last 10 years. To a man they have all lost. People are picking the corrupt candidates. You have the information you just have to Google it and then use it.
  • I tried them the first part of July. Been on straight talk (at&t towers) for years, but, in the past 12-18 months either at&t was throttling MVNO's or my area sucked data speed. Couple coworkers had t-moble, had good results. Went to a store, VERY friendly and professional people at the store I went to. Switchover easy, painless. But, that is where the good part stopped. When I got home (full bars on at&t), I had 1 bar and had to resort to wi-fi just to keep the thing from overheating trying
  • If T-Mobile now believes that the network is worthless, then they should give it to Dish, since tearing it down would be costlier.
    • They're re-utilizing the allocated spectrum for current technologies (5g). Without the spectrum, the towers and equipment would be worthless to Dish.

      From other articles, there was agreement between T-Mobile and Dish on the timeline. Dish was slow to migrate their Boost customers and is now hoping a Democrat administration will bail them out in the guise of sticking it to a big business.

      • Zero chance for 5G to re-use the same spectrum as 3G.
        In order to have a much higher bandwidth, you either have massive compression changes (nope), OR you have increased the spectrum to a higher wavelength (yup)
        3G operates at 2100 MHz and has a bandwidth of 15-20 MHz. [rantcell.com]
        OTOH,

        5G networks operate on rarely used radio millimeter bands in the 30 GHz to 300 GHz range.

        Now, before you say that T-Mobil you were wrong and that it is the hardware that t-mobile will re-use, that is also false. When somebody tells you that, think of the move from 10 MB Ethernet to 1GB Ethernet. What could be re-used? T

    • They're going to try replacing their hspa/cdma cells with "5g" ones, which will likely be a waste of time since most of those units have a broken uplink anyway. Still easier to reuse what infrastructure is there than to entirely start over.

      These compromises don't seem very effective, we saw something similar when WD had to give up some factory to Fujitsu after buying out HGST; the new Fujitsu branded drives were not nearly as competitive as Hitachi had been and they struggle to compete with WD/Seagate on c

      • Adding in 5G cells does not interfere with the 3G stuff. Everything is different. There is NO valid reason for them to take down the 3G esp. since it was a MAJOR part of the spring merger.
        • If they promised not to take down 3G, (it certainly seems that way) they shouldn't do it. The 5G cells are planned to use low (sub 1GHZ) and mid (1-6GHZ) bands primarily which includes the frequency space they're currently using on CDMA, 3G, and 4G.

          I suspect the government would have liked tmobile to phase out their own oldest tech but maintain sprints, which seems optimistic at best.

          It's unrealistic to assume that tmobile would maintain especially band26 (850mhz) for a competitor when it's some of the bes

  • Don't fine, unwind (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday August 16, 2021 @11:04PM (#61699623) Homepage Journal

    Don't fine them, undo the merger, with a chainsaw if necessary. The merger had conditions attached. T-Mobile didn't meet the conditions, so the merger is null and void. Any costs associated with undoing the merger (even if the cost involves re-creating Sprint from scratch) will fall on T-Mobile. That will include compensating Dish for any associated costs of reversing the associated sell-off to them.

    • The State of California can't do that.

      These fines make that more likely to be legally possible, though.

  • Why the hell should I take that jokers serious as a corporation?

  • CDMA is and always was an evil anti-customer network that should have been plowed under and salted 15 years ago. Don't fine them explicitly, don't undo the merger. Accelerate the transition. Make them provide every customer who is effected a new device that doesn't require the never-sufficiently-damned CDMA network, with free service up to the original transition date. That's a meaningful penalty AND it is also an unmitigated good.

    • Except all the telco's are sunsetting 3G. So anyone on 3G will need to pick up a new device too. Here is ATT's announcement. Note Feb of 2022. Right around the corner. https://www.att.com/offers/net... [att.com] And note all of those deals on ATT's page require more than a minimal service level, which is what boost really is, a cheap plan using other people's towers. I know I have some devices (not phones) that will become paperweights in Feb. It is tech today. Things go obsolete in a pretty short period of time. How
      • You're correct, HDTV was bifurcated before even NTSC was sunset, but both of those happened over 10 years ago. The big challenge for carriers and phone vendors is VoLTE which hasn't been implemented correctly even on most LTE devices.

        Even now, the LTE to HSPA switchover doesn't work. If you follow threads on XDA, many devices even have the software/firmware to support VoLTE but it's being arbitrarily disabled by the carriers because the devices haven't been "certified".

        It's not hard to imagine all of this

  • "T-Mobile's false and misleading statements under oath indicated... and that Dish would have up to three years to complete the migration, the ruling said"

    Yeah, but they said "up to." In the US it's perfectly legal to use a tiny "up to" to post misleading things. Like signs that say "up 75 percent off" with the "up to" in 12pt font and "75% off" in size 500pt. Or is it somehow misleading when they're using this tactic to the government instead of us customers?

    My moderation on this comment is guaranteed to be

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