AT&T Buying T-Mobile USA for $39B. Will GSM Monopoly Speed Up Smartphone Platform Consolidation?

There was a rumor earlier this month that Sprint and T-Mobile were discussing a merger. I pointed out that this would involve trying to get a large number of different communication protocols under the same umbrella and didn’t make much sense. Sprint, for example, still has seperate lines of CDMA and iDEN phones even though their purchase of Nextel was completed way back in 2005.