AT&T, T-Mobile court date set for merger hearing

For those of you that had high hopes for the AT&T and T-Mobile merger, U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle set the non-jury trial for February 13th, 2012. A compromise between AT&T’s requested date for January 16th, and the government’s requested date of March 19th. Though Judge Huvelle had set aside 6 months for the trial, lawyers from both AT&T and the Department of Justice believe that the trial will be settled short of the allotted time.

Earlier, Sprint’s attempt to have their case merged with the Department of Justice was blocked by the very same judge. A loss on the part of AT&T would prove to be truly devastating as the company could potentially lose up to $6 billion dollars should the merger not go through. However, even if the merger does happen to fail, AT&T seems confident that they could still avoid the breakage fee under “a number of options”.

That said, the only potential loser should this merger fail is AT&T. T-Mobile users face little to lose as AT&T has already stated that should the merger go through, T-Mobile customers would still be able to maintain their current plans as previously announced. Though the merger would reduce competition in the U.S., a consolidated network would allow provide an ailing AT&T with a greater number of accessible towers, and would add to their available bandwidth for use with their 4G network.

[via TmoNews]