AT&T ads blast T-Mobile

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Earlier this year, T-Mobile CEO John Legere took a swing a AT&T and its network during a keynote speech at CES, calling it “crap.” Legere, who took over in September, has branded his company the “un-carrier” and vowed to shake up the industry.


Well, perhaps AT&T is responding in kind, now attacking T-Mobile’s network performance in newspapers ads. AT&T ran full-page ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, claiming T-Mobile drops twice as many calls and its network speeds are only half as fast as AT&T’s.

“Wow. Looks like we struck a chord,” Chief Marketing Officer Mike Sievert told Bloomberg. “AT&T doth protest too much. Glad they’re spending their money to print our name.”

T-Mobile’s recent ads have touted the speed and geographic reach of its new fourth-generation network with the familiar pink theme and model on a motorbike/helicopter, etc.

“T-Mobile’s advertising is a combination of misguided and just plain wrong,” said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T. The newspaper ad was “just a friendly reminder of the fact that independent third-party testing says AT&T’s network delivers faster speeds and fewer dropped calls than them.”

AT&T had planned to shore up its network by acquiring T- Mobile in a $39 billion deal. The merger proposal was scuttled in 2011 after regulators raised concerns about diminishing competition in the industry. Since then, AT&T has been trying to piece together more network capacity through smaller deals.

See the Bloomberg story here