It looks like T-Mobile is finally going to merge with another company.
After the horridly bungled acquisition deal offered by AT&T, the company has been kicked to the curb and continues to be dead last among the major carriers.
That might change, though, as T-Mobile is reportedly close to inking a merger with MetroPCS, the largest of the “non-major” carriers in the US.
According to reports, MetroPCS will receive $1.5 billion in cash. There would likely be no issue at all with regulators like there was with the AT&T T-Mobile deal.
That was an acquisition deal valued at $39 billion, one of the largest such offers in corporate history.
But regulators had a bevy of problems, including the fact that T-Mobile and AT&T are the only two major carrier in the US that operate on the GSM standard (Verizon and Sprint use a different format called CDMA), and that the resulting company would be so big and dwarf over the competition, that no one would be convinced that it would lead to anything but higher prices and less competition.
This was, of course, a known hurdle from the day the two companies started hammering out a deal. As a result, AT&T guaranteed T-Mobile that it would pay $4 billion as a concession fee for wasting the company’s time and limiting its ability to expand.
That $4 billion only goes so far, though, and T-Mobile definitely needs a boost in the US market. Neither T-Mobile nor MetroPCS has commented at this time.
