On Thursday, T-Mobile CEO John Legere went on an epic rant about the upcoming FCC spectrum auction, claiming that there was some “serious shit” going on in D.C. and that AT&T and Verizon were trying to bulldoze the American people.
Not so fast says Verizon.
In a rebuttal post on its public policy blog, Verizon said that the T-Mobile boss was way off base with his remarks, pointing out that T-Mobile is free to participate in any FCC spectrum auction it chooses to.
“Beyond the fact that the administrators of his alma mater St. Bernard’s Central Catholic School, the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, would probably rap his hand with a ruler for that kind of language, Mr. Legere is simply wrong,” according to the post, which is titled “Watch the Language.”
It goes on to say that T-Mobile, along with Sprint and Dish, successfully lobbied the FCC to set aside spectrum in an auction only reserved for them.
The post notes:
This set-aside of 30 MHz of spectrum is intended for “smaller carriers.” Yet T-Mobile’s parent company is Deutsche Telecom and has a market cap of $76 billion. Sprint’s parent company is Softbank, with a similar market cap of about $70 billion. In other words, these aren’t “small” companies. This set aside also comes at a time when T-Mobile is rumored to be in early talks with DISH on a merger that would give them the combined company more than double the per-customer capacity of Verizon – if it actually deployed it on a network (something DISH has yet to do despite its massive spectrum holdings).
For its part, AT&T responded to our requests for comment yesterday by pointing us to this April blog post, which says T-Mobile and others are not interested in the facts.
Of course, Legere is not backing down from his claims, and he’s once again taking to Twitter to respond to Verizon’s latest blog post.
If I had the deep pockets @Verizon has, I’d be telling you @TMobile is wrong, too. Why? I’d want to keep my pockets deep. #DefeatDuopoly
— John Legere (@JohnLegere) June 12, 2015
Meanwhile, in case you missed it, here’s the rant by Legere in which he calls Verizon “dumb” and AT&T “dumber,” claiming the two industry leaders don’t give a damn about the industry or consumers.
