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AT&T has many strategies for trying to convince the US government to let it buy T-Mobile , but the one it emphasized was this — it would attempt to make remaining carriers Verizon, Sprint and even a handful of rural entities look like “intense competition .” Well, it seems that tack hasn’t quite had the impact that the board of directors was hoping for, because it just delivered a gigantic new document to the FCC, which portrays itself as the victim of its own success. AT&T says it had to deliver 8,000 times more data in 2010 than it did three years prior — over 10 petabytes a year these days — and foresees that it will deliver that same amount of data “in just the first five to seven weeks of 2015.” Meanwhile, T-Mobile is the knight in shining magenta armor to save AT&T from those “severe capacity constraints,” but since AT&T can’t let regulators think that T-Mobile’s departure from the arena will result is less competition, Ma Bell simultaneously bashes its prospective conquest for having a “diminished market role” in the telecom industry and “no clear path to deploy LTE” — even as it says that acquiring T-Mobile would result in the means to spread speedy Long Term Evolution across 97.3 percent of the general population. In case you’re keeping track, that’s up from the 95 percent the company last prognosticated . The seeming contradictions here are certainly amusing, but we have to admit the promised giant LTE network tempts us quite a bit. But is it worth building a GSM monopoly to do it? Envision the repercussions for yourself — both good and ill — by studying the following links. Continue reading AT&T tells FCC just how important T-Mobile is, in 381-page redacted document AT&T tells FCC just how important T-Mobile is, in 381-page redacted document originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink