There hasn’t been all that much attention paid to the potential Sprint-T-Mobile merger recently, both because it’s been overshadowed by the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger and because it sounds like there’s little chance of federal regulators actually signing off on it. However, Reuters brings us word that the Kyodo news agency in Japan is reporting that T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom has agreed to the terms of a merger agreement proposed by Sprint parent company SoftBank. Terms of the proposed deal have not yet been revealed.
Deutsche Telekom has been trying to unload T-Mobile onto another buyer for a while now and most recently tried unsuccessfully to sell the “Uncarrier” off to AT&T. While the FCC squashed that proposed merger due to concerns that it would kill competition in the wireless industry, SoftBank CEO and Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son has been making the case that he needs to have T-Mobile’s spectrum and network infrastructure to create a truly competitive wireless network capable of taking on incumbent giants AT&T and Verizon.
Even if DT has agreed to sell off T-Mobile to SoftBank, both companies will still have a lot of work to do convincing regulators that the deal would be good for American consumers. The real action for this merger has just started.
