T-Mobile to FCC: We Would Agree With You if You Were Right

The Federal Communications Commission has concluded that a free national broadband network established in the so-called “white spaces” of the AWS-3 band would not cause major interference with other services, paving the way for a sale of those airwaves at a federal auction. An unfortunate turn of events for T-Mobile (DT), which has been aggressively lobbying against the idea, arguing that such a network would interfere with the services it offers in a band of spectrum–a band it spent $4.2 billion to license in 2006. “Obviously, we’re disappointed,” said Tom Sugrue, T-Mobile’s vice president of government affairs. “From our preliminary review, [the report] has a number of critical flaws and misinterpretations of the data and some mischaracterizations.”