October 2012

Vodafone’s Vittorio Colao needs to decide whether Vodafone stays in its US wireless venture with America’s Verizon, or whether it takes a step back and employs its capital elsewhere.

The decision to establish a new mobile telephony company between Vodafone and what was then Bell Atlantic back in 1999 was a brave and visionary step. Verizon Wireless has proved to be strategically astute (in a defensive sense) and it also has shown itself to be highly profitable, even if it has proved difficult to turn those profits into hard cash. But this mobile marriage between Vodafone and what is now America’s Verizon Communications has also been a management nightmare for Colao and his predecessors at the British company, Sir Chris Gent and Arun Sarin. The ownership split is 55 percent Verizon, 45 percent Vodafone. So whether it’s the choice of technical standards, the distribution of dividends, or pretty much anything else, Verizon calls the shots.

Deutsche Telekom AG, T-Mobile USA, and MetroPCS Communications have filed applications seeking Federal Communications Commission consent to the transfer of control of Personal Communications Service licenses and leases, one lower 700 MHz license, as well as international 214 authorizations, held by MetroPCS and its wholly-owned and controlled subsidiaries and by T-Mobile and its wholly-owned and controlled subsidiaries to a newly combined entity.

Under the agreement to combine T-Mobile and MetroPCS, Deutsche Telekom’s indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary, T-Mobile Global Holding GmbH (“T-Mobile Holding”), would transfer all of its ownership interests in T-Mobile to MetroPCS, and MetroPCS would then issue stock to T-Mobile Holding or its designee. The agreement would result in Deutsche Telekom and existing MetroPCS shareholders ultimately holding 74 percent and 26 percent ownership interests, respectively, in the newly combined entity. The newly combined entity would be named T-Mobile US, Inc., and both the MetroPCS brand and the T-Mobile brand would be retained, offered through separate business units. The Applicants state that the proposed transaction would combine complementary spectrum portfolios that, in some markets, would result in larger blocks of contiguous spectrum to allow for higher speeds, throughput rates, and increased capacity, and in other markets, would augment the spectrum holdings of the combined company to enable broader and more robust Long Term Evolution deployment. The Applicants further state that the proposed transfers would allow the newly combined company to make more efficient use of the spectrum and offer improved services to consumers across the country.

Preliminary review of the Applications indicates that T-Mobile and MetroPCS would combine their AWS-1 and PCS spectrum, as well as one lower 700 MHz license, in 248 Cellular Market Areas across the nation. Post-transaction, in markets in which there is geographical overlap the merged entity would hold a maximum of 110 megahertz of spectrum covering approximately 141 million people, or 46 percent of the population of the mainland United States. In addition to the applications filed proposing to transfer control of MetroPCS’s licenses to the combined company, T-Mobile has filed applications proposing what it characterizes as pro forma transfers of control of all of its licenses and authorizations to the newly combined entity. Those applications are included on this public notice as well.

Interested parties must file petitions to deny no later than November 26, 2012. Persons and entities that file petitions to deny become parties to the proceeding. They may participate fully in the proceeding, including seeking access to any confidential information that may be filed under a protective order, seeking reconsideration of decisions, and filing appeals of a final decision to the courts. Oppositions to such pleadings must be filed no later than December 6, 2012. Replies to such pleadings must be filed no later than December 17, 2012. All filings concerning matters referenced in this Public Notice should refer to WT Docket No. 12-301 and reference the specific file numbers of the individual applications to which the filings pertain.

Apple complied with a U.K. court mandate that it publicly recant allegations that Samsung copied the design of the iPad for its own Galaxy tablet. But it did so with a statement that is hardly the “public grovel” it complained of to a U.K. appeals court. Apple’s statement cites at length a widely publicized High Court finding that said Samsung’s Galaxy tablets were “not cool” enough to be mistaken for iPads. And it goes on to point out that while the U.K. court didn’t find Samsung guilty of infringement, courts in the U.S. and Germany have. Which makes it hardly an apology at all, and a masterful twist of the court mandate.

Wireless service provider Clearwire said it will use equipment from China's Huawei in a high-speed network upgrade it starts in 2013, with the blessing of the U.S. government.

Clearwire said it reviewed its plans "with the technical arms of multiple federal agencies" and that it has "great respect for the U.S. government and their oversight role over the nation's infrastructure." The decision follows a U.S. congressional report earlier this month that said Huawei network equipment should be kept out of the U.S. market as potential Chinese state influence could pose a security threat. Clearwire's biggest shareholder and customer is Sprint Nextel, which provides telecom services to the U.S. government. Sprint, which is being taken over by Softbank Corp , plans to use the Clearwire high-speed network to boost its capacity for its own service.