Coalition Presses FCC to Overturn T-Mobile–UScellular Approval

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22, 2025 – Rural carriers and labor unions said the Federal Communications Commission relied on a flawed view of competition when staff approved T-Mobile’s $4.3 billion purchase of UScellular assets.

In clearing the T-Mobile–UScellular deal, bureau staff leaned on the idea that cable providers  offering wireless service through mobile virtual network operator agreements, such as Comcast’s Xfinity or Charter’s Spectrum, act as a competitive check on the Big Three carriers: T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T.

However, a coalition seeking full Commission review of the bureaus’ July approval argued MVNOs cannot serve as meaningful rivals because their wholesale access is controlled by the very nationwide mobile carriers they are supposed to compete against.

“The bureaus’ conclusion that cable MVNOs act as ‘competitive constraints’ is unsupported by the facts,” the groups wrote to the FCC on Sept. 17. “The continued success of MVNOs is entirely reliant on the will of the nationwide MNOs to allow them to compete.”

Two days earlier, legal counsel for the coalition – Carri Bennet and Stephen Sharbaugh for the Rural Wireless Association, Andrew Jay Schwartzman for the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, and Hooman Hedayati for the Communications Workers of America – met with Arpan Sura, senior counsel and chief AI officer to Chairman Brendan Carr, to press the FCC to take up their petition and reverse the staff-level merger approval.

The coalition argued that the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications and International Bureaus overstepped when they cleared the transaction in July.

“Delegating the matter to the Bureaus was an error of law,” they wrote, pointing out that staff 

applied a novel ‘competitive constraint’ test in place of the FCC’s long-standing ‘effective competition’ standard – a novel policy call they said belongs before the full Commission.

They further warned that the deal – which gives T-Mobile control of roughly 4.4 million UScellular customers, hundreds of retail stores and about a third of its spectrum – will accelerate a wave of consolidation in the wireless market.

“With the pending AT&T-UScellular and Verizon-UScellular spectrum deals coupled with the recently announced sale of EchoStar spectrum to both AT&T and SpaceX, the T-Mobile-UScellular transaction now appears to only be the tip of the iceberg to lessening competition,” the coalition wrote.

If the FCC ultimately upholds the bureaus’ approval, the coalition urged it to impose conditions outlined in its application for review. Chief among them was ensuring rural carriers gain access to the spectrum T-Mobile acquired, after the bureaus, they said, wrongly concluded that smaller providers had a fair opportunity to compete for those licenses.

The groups also pushed for handset unlocking requirements, noting that the FCC’s pending rulemaking would only cover new devices going forward, if adopted at all. They argued merger-specific obligations were needed now to prevent T-Mobile from locking in customers.

Finally, they called for reciprocal roaming obligations to be part of any approval, warning that the bureaus understated the risk that rural subscribers will be left without adequate coverage when traveling outside their home networks. Existing FCC rules, they said, fall short of guaranteeing fair roaming arrangements with nationwide carriers.