Ultimately, the fate of this merger depends on jobs. Of the proposed $6 billion in savings per year, 93% is opex. At least $2 billion of the opex savings come from sales, marketing, advertising, IT and administrative cost savings, which typically means job losses. If regulators look at the job situation in a narrow way then it's difficult to see how this merger would create net jobs.

The parents of T-Mobile and Sprint recently announced their intentions to merge their U.S. operations in a $59 billion deal. It combined the distant third and fourth largest operators to form a competitor of almost the size of AT&T’s and Verizon’s mobile operation, with the potential to supercharge T-Mobile’s unbroken three-year win record of growing faster than the rest of the industry combined. This merger is nothing less than a T-Mobile takeover, considering that T-Mobile shareholders will own two-thirds of the company and the new T-Mobile management is being led by John Legere and Mike Sievert with the new headquarters being at the old T-Mobile headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. The Kansas City co-headquarters will meet the same fate as the Reston co-headquarters did in the Sprint Nextel merger. Give it a year or two and it’s gone.  

The merger comes at a time when both AT&T and Verizon are already in a postwireless world looking for growth in the combination of content and digital advertising. The logic for T-Mobile and Sprint to merge is compelling. The cost savings of building one 5G network instead of two are significant. The synergies of streamlining the combined operations and retail presence is going to be another major factor. Investors will focus on all the combined cost savings; antitrust regulators will look at the consequences of the combined cost savings.