US move to kill phone deal = good news for pay TV: report

 a Sprint/T-Mobile pairing would be equally unacceptable.  Sprint now 

regains a competitor (T-Mobile) forced to re-energize its competitiveness in Sprint's core middle market.  

Sprint also potentially loses support of the Cable MSOs, who have been rumored partners for Sprint's 4G 

strategy but who now may have a better option in T-Mobile USA.

 The collapse of the deal is also bad news for Verizon Wireless, albeit more moderately so than for Sprint.  

Verizon would have benefitted from a more rational industry structure just like everyone else.  And 

Verizon would likely also have been a potential beneficiary of spectrum and subscriber divestitures, 

potentially at bargain-basement prices.

 Perhaps the only real winners here are the Pay TV providers.  For Comcast and TWC, this significantly 

reduces the near term risk of a good-money-after-bad investment in Clearwire and/or Sprint. Moreover, 

Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile now re-emerges as a potential buyer of cable's unused AWS spectrum.  

 And perhaps the biggest winner of all is Dish Network.  Dish now has a much more credible potential 

partner for its nascent wireless strategy.  And that partner, T-Mobile, is backed by a deep pocketed (but 

tight fisted) parent and is in need of spectrum (Dish doesn't appear to want to spend its own money 

building a wireless network).

 All this suggests that, for Pay TV operators at least, T-Mobile is now (once again) the belle of the ball, 

and there could well be a race between Cable and Satellite to win her good graces