AT&T formally filed papers with the FCC supporting its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA and responding to critics.
AT&T's top argument is that the merger will give it the scale, spectrum and other resources to deploy LTE to more than 97 percent of the U.S. population. The company says consumers will benefit because the expanded capacity will provide "a more robust platform for the next generation of bandwidth-intensive mobile applications while improving consumers' overall service quality through faster data speeds and fewer dropped and blocked calls."
If the merger is approved, the company promises to make an additional investment of more than $8 billion to expand LTE deployment and to integrate the AT&T and T-Mobile USA networks.
AT&T also argues that the merger will create jobs and investment, help bridge the digital divide, and help achieve the Administration's rural broadband objectives, all without the expenditure of government funds.
The FCC filing includes endorsements of the merger from ADTRAN, Avaya, Brocade, Corning, CWA, Facebook, KPCB, Microsoft, Oracle, Qualcomm, RIM, Yahoo!, many state governors and politicians, and others.http://www.mobilizeeverything.com/fcc.php
It features a suite of test features for Layer 2 and Layer 3, including protocol testing, capture, histograms, service disruption measurements, multi-stream Ethernet generation & test and RFC 2544 benchmarking. This is augmented with 40/100G-specific features such as virtual lane swapping, skewing and PRBS testing.
