Dish said to be close to buying Boost from Sprint

The disposal of assets required to sugar the pill of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger looks likely to be completed by US cableco Dish.

The latest goss comes from Bloomberg, which has been chatting to people who reckon they know what they’re talking about. These mysterious oracles say Dish is ready to drop $6 billion on prepaid operator brand Boost as well as a bunch of other unspecified stuff.

Since Boost has been valued at around $3 billion that’s quite a lot of unaccounted for expenditure. Since US regulators would ideally like a new national operator to be created before it will allow two of them to marge, this probably means some spectrum and whatever else Dish needs to become a viable MNO.

Apparently the WSJ had written a similar story last week so these telecoms Deep Throats are being nice and busy. Presumably they’re affiliated to the interested parties in some way and are floating trial balloons to see gauge broader sentiment on such a deal. None of the share prices of the companies concerned did much in response to the revelations.

Light Reading has reported on commentary from an Analyst who doesn’t think this is a great idea. He notes that it looks like a lose/lose since it takes spectrum away from TMUS/Sprint and cash away from Dish, in both cases depriving them of commodities they’re already short of. But big M&A usually ends up being about the egos of the big shots involved and if all those concerned fancy the idea they’ll probably go ahead regardless.