Petition to Deny AT&T/Cingular Merger

Even assuming the Commission accepts the theory that wireless is a strictly national product, the levels of concentration proposed by this transaction are well beyond acceptable bounds under the Merger Guidelines. Cingular and AT&T claim that there are six national competitors and a set of regional carriers, however, a close look at their own data shows that this set of competitors is almost never present in even the largest 100 markets. In eighty-five percent of the top 100 markets, at least one of the national competitors is absent or none of the major regional carriers identified by CAWS is present. HHI analysis of the national wireless market that corrects for this error finds this industry is in the “highly concentrated” zone, and consequently a merger of this magnitude would easily blow through the Merger Guidelines.