Telecom companies make all sorts of promises when they need government approval for a merger.

After a while, they all tend to sound the same. AT&T, for example, has continually pledged to build out its wireline and wireless networks to greater numbers of Americans in order to gain favor with regulators.

AT&T's promises have been generally the same since its purchase of BellSouth in 2006: home broadband for everyone in its entire wireline service area and cellular coverage for nearly everyone in the United States. The company's pending $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV brings more of the same, with AT&T promising "to upgrade two million additional locations to high-speed broadband with GigaPower FTTP (fiber to the premise) and expand our high-speed broadband footprint to an additional 13 million locations."

What those "additional locations" for fiber are in addition to still isn't clear because AT&T already announced a nationwide fiber expansion earlier this year, just without saying how many people would be offered the service. The 13 million additional non-fiber broadband locations won't even be delivered using any form of wired Internet—they are dependent on AT&T's LTE network, which is already supposed to cover 95 percent of the country.

You'd think AT&T would already have the entire country blanketed in high-speed Internet access by now if you take a look back at its promises made throughout the years. So let's do that, with a hat tip to telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick and Karl Bode of DSLReports for surfacing some of these examples in the past few days.

Promises, promises, promises

AT&T/BellSouth, 2006: In the Federal Communications Commission's approval of this merger on December 29, 2006, the commission said there would be "significant public interest benefits" such as "deployment of broadband throughout the entire AT&T-BellSouth in-region territory in 2007."

The merged company promised to provide "100 percent of the residential living units in the AT&T/BellSouth in-region territory" with broadband by December 31, 2007, with 85 percent of those living units getting broadband via wireline technology.

AT&T apparently didn't meet that promise, with rural customers reporting years later that they still couldn't get AT&T Internet service. (AT&T also promised $10 per month service but made it difficult for consumers to find.)

"Broadband" at the time was defined as just 200Kbps, while now it is defined as 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps up as a result of a change in 2010. Even AT&T's DSL over old copper telephone lines is capable of that and more. Yet AT&T no longer promises that newer versions of its broadband technology will hit 85 percent of its service area. In November 2012, AT&T announced a $14 billion buildout over three years, saying its "wired IP broadband network [is] expected to expand to 75 percent of customer locations in AT&T's 22-state wireline service area by year-end 2015." (The 75 percent promise includes 57 million home and small business locations, whereas the merger promise of 85 percent was just for residential locations.)

Most of the 75 percent were promised U-verse (primarily delivered as fiber-to-the-neighborhood, copper-to-the-home) rather than basic DSL. In the other 25 percent of its wireline area, AT&T said that "it's currently not economically feasible to build a competitive IP wireline network," so those people would have to make do with cellular. AT&T's 2012 announcement pitched LTE as a substitute for the company's wired broadband.

AT&T/T-Mobile, 2011: AT&T's announcement that it would buy T-Mobile on March 20, 2011 said, "AT&T commits to a significant expansion of robust 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) deployment to 95 percent of the US population to reach an additional 46.5 million Americans beyond current plans—including rural communities and small towns."

AT&T grudgingly gave up on buying T-Mobile by the end of 2011 after regulators refused to approve the acquisition, but the company's subsequent statements showed that it never needed T-Mobile to cover the entire US in LTE. In that same 2012 announcement that promised expanded U-verse deployments, AT&T said it "plans to expand its 4G LTE network to cover 300 million people in the United States by year-end 2014, up from its current plans to deploy 4G LTE to about 250 million people by year-end 2013." 300 million is 94.3 percent of the country's estimated population of 318.3 million. AT&T's 2012 plan also called for LTE coverage for 99 percent of its 22-state wireline service area.

Besides that, DSLReports pointed out that an AT&T document in 2011 showed it could have upgraded its nationwide LTE coverage from 80 percent to 97 percent for $3.8 billion. AT&T decided that was too high a price even though it was willing to pay $39 billion to buy T-Mobile (and AT&T ultimately had to pay a $4 billion breakup fee when the acquisition didn't get approved).

AT&T/DirecTV, 2014: Now we're caught up to the present day, in which AT&T is making more of the same promises. AT&T claims cost savings related to the $48.5 billion merger will result in an additional two million fiber-to-the-premises customer locations, yet the company already announced before the DirecTV deal that it was examining 100 cities for possible fiber deployments. We've asked AT&T how many customers would get fiber-to-the-home if the DirecTV deal is rejected, but the company hasn't answered. Kushnick pointed out that SBC (now AT&T) was promising fiber-to-the-home deployments to 300,000 homes as early as 2004.

As for the other 13 million locations set to receive high-speed broadband as a result of the DirecTV merger, that's not wired broadband. Instead, it would be home Internet service delivered over AT&T's cellular network, aka "fixed wireless." Similar to wired Internet, AT&T's fixed wireless service relies on a modem but instead connects to the cellular network.

AT&T made $128.8 billion in revenue last year, and its LTE network already covers nearly the entire country. Expanding fixed wireless thus isn't that big a deal for the company. Still, the 13 million will be mostly outside of AT&T's traditional home Internet service area. One AT&T filing with the SEC says that "about 85 percent of the customer locations, moreover, are expected to be outside of AT&T’s wireline footprint," serving largely rural areas with few Internet options. Almost 20 percent of the 13 million locations "have no access to terrestrial broadband services today," AT&T said.

AT&T also said it needs to buy DirecTV because U-verse TV is "uneconomic and not fully competitive with cable providers." AT&T was more upbeat in 2012, saying it would "expand U-verse (TV, Internet, Voice over IP) by more than one-third or about 8.5 million additional customer locations, for a total potential U-verse market of 33 million customer locations. The expansion is expected to be essentially complete by year-end 2015."

The public’s interest

Like the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger, AT&T/DirecTV will receive scrutiny from the Department of Justice, the FCC, and Congress. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans a hearing on the merger for June 24. AT&T says it expects to complete the deal by May 2015.

While the DOJ reviews transactions to determine whether they would reduce competition, the FCC has a broader mandate to review whether the merger serves the public interest. While regulators examine AT&T/DirecTV, they would do well to compare AT&T's latest promises to its earlier ones and ask whether the pledges are simply things AT&T could do regardless of whether it's allowed to acquire another company.