Sprint has received proposals from several banks with respect to financing a potential bid for smaller rival T-Mobile. No such deal has been announced, but as many as three banks have approached Sprint with offers to provide the needed capital. The Wall Street Journal reports that banks are looking at a total value for T-Mobile of about $50 billion, including $31 billion for T-Mobile itself and an additional $20 billion to cover T-Mobile's debt. The Journal says executives at Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank, the companies that own T-Mobile and Sprint, respectively, have agreed in principle that the companies' best chance to compete against AT&T and Verizon Wireless is to combine forces. Such a deal would require regulatory approval, which could be a major hurdle for the merger to jump. Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank execs want the deal to be completed before the start of a major spectrum auction scheduled to take place in the middle of 2015. They believe it may take more than a year to win regulatory approval for a proposed merger.


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