Executives from T-Mobile, Sprint and, particularly, DISH will be cross examined tomorrow morning, as two days of hearings kick off at the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco. Witnesses from the CPUC’s public advocates office will also be on the stand. They’ll all have to explain written testimony they submitted about the wonderfulness, or lack thereof, of T-Mobile’s proposed takeover of Sprint, and asset and people spinoff to DISH.
It’s DISH’s intended role as a new, nationwide mobile telecoms competitor that’s likely to get the sharpest attention. Only one DISH representative will attend, chief D.C. staff lobbyist Jeff Blum. So far, he hasn’t been very forthcoming about DISH’s plan for California, and the CPUC administrative law judge managing the merger review, Karl Bemesderfer, indicated he will drill down on it. During a pre-hearing conference call, Bemesderfer said “I want to hear how DISH is going to do what it says it’s going to do”.
The initial line-up, which could change, has T-Mobile’s executives and a hired economist testifying tomorrow, as well as PAO staff and its hired economist. Blum is due to take the stand on Friday.
Meanwhile, Sprint’s Lifeline billing problem just got a little bit bigger. According to a Wall Street Journal story, Sprint was getting subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission and, presumably, the California Public Utilities Commission for low income customers who weren’t really customers. Weren’t even alive.
As the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society thumbnail of the WSJ story puts it…
Sprint also made mistakes in tallying how many subscribers were using their Lifeline service in 2013 and 2014. Because of an error in how it counted usage at the time, spam texts could keep dormant accounts live and allow Sprint to continue to collect subsidies for those customers, the documents show. In one case, the phone of an Oregon woman who died months earlier was still deemed active.
Living and dead, Sprint was collecting on at least 4,600 dormant customers just in Oregon.
My clients include California cities who do business with T-Mobile. I like to think that has no bearing on my commentary. Take it for what it’s worth.