August 2019

An Engineer’s View of the Department of Justice’s T-Mobile/Sprint/DISH Strategy

To address the loss of a mobile communications competitor that will result from the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has proposed a solution that seeks to enable DISH Network to emerge as a fourth national facilities-based wireless carrier. From an engineering perspective, however, DOJ’s approach to enabling DISH’s deployment is not guaranteed to prove adequate to maintain competition comparable to that currently offered over Sprint’s network.

FCC's Pai targets Lifeline fraudsters, but doesn't propose a funding cap

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is looking to root out waste, fraud and abuse in Lifeline, the FCC's phone subsidy program for the poor. But he's not ready to cap the budget on the program just yet. His office began circulating its latest proposal for cleaning up the program. The latest proposed action is what the FCC is calling an "administrative clean-up" but it doesn't tackle some of the more controversial items on the agency's to-do list, such as instituting a funding cap and excluding wireless resellers from participating in the program.