The telecom industry in the United States has been rapidly consolidating over the past couple of years, and T-Mobile is the company that all the others seem to want to get their hands on but haven’t been able to. Tim Horan, an analyst with Oppenheimer, claims that all of America’s top wireless carriers will be acquired by cable providers in the near future in order to survive, and Comcast may be the company that managed to get its hands on T-Mobile.
All four major U.S. wireless providers will have to get into pay TV if they want to survive, according to Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan. In a new research report, Horan predicts that, when the dust settles on another round of consolidation, the four surviving players in the wireless competitive landscape will be AT&T, Comcast, Sprint and Verizon. Horan sees Comcast or Charter Communications as the companies most likely to acquire T-Mobile and give Dish Network only a 10 percent chance of buying its way into the wireless market with a T-Mobile acquisition. T-Mobile has been linked to both Dish and Comcast in potential merger reports. But talks between Dish and T-Mobile have reportedly stalled over structuring a combined company and Comcast is reportedly not interested in buying T-Mobile. Sprint, now seeing increased support from its majority owner, Japanese carrier SoftBank, has also been reported as a potential M&A partner for T-Mobile and Comcast. Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son fought against reluctant regulators in pursuing a merger with T-Mobile that he eventually abandoned. Son also offered to sell Sprint to Comcast and the deal reportedly garnered little interest.
