[Sprint HTC One (M7)] ThePhoneGeek:
A few random thoughts from someone who has worked for carriers for 20 years and seen all the mergers first hand on the AT&T side and is now with Sprint...

1) FCC/Justice would probably only consider further consolidation of the wireless sector on a big scale if it was a Sprint/TMO merger.

2) With Softbank behind Sprint such a deal would be possible. I recall last week a news article about Japanese government investing a few $billion more in Softbank (sorry no link but read it somewhere). Could this be why, perhaps.

3) TMO needs to do a deal more than Sprint needs to do a deal. Reason being is spectrum. As the demand for more bandwidth increases the ability to manage that demand will come down to who has the most spectrum to cram packets of data through. Of all the US carriers who is best positioned with the most spectrum of any carrier, Sprint. Who among the four is in the weakest position, TMO.

4) The uncarrier looks attractive to consumers at the moment because of the offers on phones, data plans, etc. The problem is that the long term health of the company doesn't look good because they don't have the spectrum resources to manage the data needs as we get to 2015 and beyond. This means slower speeds, more blocking, etc.

5) Sprint would likely be doing simply what AT&T tried to do when they made a play to buy TMO a couple years ago. Buy a customer base. Simply put buy the customers so you're bigger and closer to the top two. However I really don't think they need to do this.

6) Someone mentioned GSM. Sprint won't change their network to GSM, if a merger were to happen they'd most likely be required to continue operating TMOs GSM network until 2016ish but by that time all the major players will be using VoLTE so there would be no need for the traditional GSM or CDMA networks as they exist today.

Lastly my opinion is that while Sprint could do this deal I really don't think they should. I think a much more likely scenario would be to buy smaller carriers like US Cellular among others because TMO has too much bureaucracy and would require massive job cuts to make TMO fit into the Sprint model and that would be bad press that Sprint wouldn't want to go through nor get distracted by.

In the end buy smaller players that fit easily into your model, stay the course on building a better and bigger network, and then leverage the massive spectrum holdings you have into a customer friendly model that gives you a network equal in size to the top two but better because you have more spectrum to operate with giving you the ability to move data faster than your competitors. Consolidation will have to happen eventually and while consumer advocates are generally against it there is no way around it without completely reworking wireless spectrum and the FCC can't/won't do that so as the thirst for data increases the need for spectrum will as well and small players just won't be able to survive so we'll likely end up with two or three carriers eventually...

Verizon and AT&T need TMO to survive so that there are four players in the market and both of them can continue to buy up small fish to correct their spectrum deficiencies. If TMO gets bought or dies out (a more likely scenario) then VZN/ATT will be stuck, they have no path to grow, they have no merger path, they have huge bureaucracies choking them making overhead high and they start bleeding customers....

MG