By Joel Kelsey, August 24, 2011
Last Thursday five AT&T employees and twelve of its outside attorneys, from six different firms, got on a conference call with thirty-two officials from the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice. All told there were close to 50 people participating in the meeting.
Ostensibly, the conference call was for AT&T to explain its third and latest economic model that attempts to justify its merger with T-Mobile. But AT&T’s attempt seems to be more evidence that its bid to monopolize everything has been unraveling. The conference call represents yet another trip to the drawing board for AT&T, which has yet to convince the regulators that its numbers and projections justifying the merger actually add up. The all-hands-on-deck approach of the conference call looks like AT&T is sticking with the only tune it knows: quantity over quality.