The Dish ‘fix’ for the T-Mobile-Sprint merger seems more shortsighted than ever

To sell regulators on their $26 billion mega merger, T-Mobile and Sprint executives told anyone who’d listen that the deal would provide near-miraculous benefits. But economists warned that US telecom merger promises are historically meaningless, and the reduction in overall competitors would — sooner or later — result in higher prices and job cuts. Instead of heeding their warnings and blocking the deal, US antitrust enforcers concocted an elaborate workaround: they would erect Dish Network as the nation’s new fourth major wireless carrier. Under the plan Dish received some T-Mobile spectrum, the Boost Mobile prepaid brand, and the assurance that T-Mobile would help Dish run a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) while it got its own nationwide network up and running. But squabbling between the companies culminated in Dish announcing it would be replacing T-Mobile with AT&T as its primary partner, indicating that T-Mobile and Dish were simply incapable of getting along, and the government was never that interested in forcing them.