The Scoop
In the midst of the Trump administration’s review of AT&T’s $23 billion deal to buy spectrum licenses from EchoStar, CEO John Stankey paid the president a visit earlier this week.
The White House meeting was billed as a way to foreshadow AT&T’s massive $250 billion investment in US infrastructure and jobs, but Stankey also referenced AT&T’s pending deal to acquire EchoStar’s spectrum, in the context of the company’s broader investment in the US, according to people familiar with the meeting.
That deal would cement the concentration of spectrum further in the hands of the big three carriers. It would give AT&T a stronger beachhead to compete with Verizon and T-Mobile, and help the company further muscle out the cable competitors from the valuable spectrum. AT&T is in the middle of its antitrust approval process and faces a potential independent monitor to oversee how AT&T negotiates with its competitors to access its spectrum, as the DOJ has done in similar acquisitions.
AT&T denied a quid-pro-quo between Stankey’s meeting and the Justice Department’s review of the EchoStar deal.
“Our $250 billion commitment is driven by the need to provide connectivity for innovation and growth in the AI era,” an AT&T spokesperson said of the company’s announcement this week. It wasn’t based on “some absurd claim fabricated by an anonymous source likely threatened by the increased competition that would benefit consumers if the EchoStar spectrum acquisition is approved.”
White House chief of Staff Susie Wiles referenced Stankey’s meeting with Trump publicly at a Business Roundtable event that Stankey attended, according to other people familiar with the matter.
Pressed for comment on the conversation, a White House official told Semafor the Trump administration does not comment “on private meetings that may or may not have happened.”
Know More
Spectrum rights have become a hot commodity for everyone from Elon Musk to the German-owned T-Mobile, both of which tried to scoop up EchoStar’s other spectrum licenses last year, Semafor scooped.
In FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, they’ve found a regulator who is more comfortable with consolidation than many of his predecessors, an issue that has rankled cable operators like Comcast and Charter, both of which have their own telephone networks but don’t own any spectrum.
Instead, they lease airwaves from the Big Three carriers — and are worried those leasing costs will only go up dramatically as more and more spectrum gets hoovered up by fewer and fewer players, rather than being shared among all participants.
Shelby Talcott contributed to this report.