T-Mobile thinks merger with Sprint makes sense

The telecom business makes for strange bedfellows. The latest odd pairing in the industry rife with rumors is the idea that Overland Park’s Sprint strike a merger deal with T-Mobile.

It’s easy to speculate, as some have, about this particular merger in the wireless business. After all, there are really only four major wireless companies in the United States. Sprint and T-Mobile make up the bottom half of that list, well behind Verizon and AT&T.

Earlier on Wednesday, a T-Mobile executive threw a matchstick at the notion that Sprint and T-Mobile combine.

“It’s the logical ultimate combination,” T-Mobile chief financial officer Braxton Carter told Reuters on Wednesday at a Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York.

Carter wouldn’t tell Reuters whether the two companies had discussed the possibility.

T-Mobile was on its way to a merger with AT&T (which leads the domestic pack for wireless service) in 2011. The proposal caused Sprint CEO Dan Hesse to race to Capitol Hill (and anyone else who would listen) to try and spoil the T-Mobile/AT&T deal. He made the case to Congress that the merger would gobble up too much market share into one company, leading to higher prices and less competition in the wireless industry. Of course, he was probably looking out for his own interest, as Sprint would have been relegated to the back of the pack among wireless competitors.

In the end, the deal fell apart months later when federal regulators agreed with Hesse’s premise.