At the tail end of last week we were one of the earliest sites to make mention of Sprint’s possible bid for T-Mobile USA. T-Mobile USA, or just T-Mobile here in the US is the United States arm of Deutsche Telekom an international leader in wireless communications. In the US though T-Mobile is firmly implanted as the number 4 carrier behind the likes of Verizon, AT&T and Sprint (in that order).

Two years ago, just ahead of the Spring CTIA conference in Orlando, it was announced that AT&T was making an offer for T-Mobile. That offer immediately fell under regulatory scrutiny and in the end AT&T ended up forking over a “break up” fee and T-Mobile stayed in the hands of Deutsche Telekom.

Briefly after the AT&T breakup, it seemed that everyone and their mother wanted to bid on T-Mobile. After the dust settled though, T-Mobile ended up using some of it’s break up money from AT&T and acquired prepaid carrier Metro PCS.

2013 started to look like the turnaround year for T-Mobile. The company was often at the top of the JD Power & Associates customer rankings however those rankings slipped during the turmoil of the impending AT&T merger. After the merger fell apart T-Mobile went back to the top of those lists.

They also led the trend as the “un-carrier”, essentially dropping long term contracts and subsidies in favor of 24month financing on all of their devices. In fact they are set to unveil the newest and 4th part of their unccarrier strategy very shortly.

But then there was that Sprint story last week. Immediately every tech journal and website known to man began postulating on a possible outcome of a Sprint/T-Mobile deal. But wait, in comes another horse.

Enter Dish

Dish has been trying to expand their portfolio into the wireless realm. The satellite provider, that also owns Blockbuster, was the top bidder, next to Sprint, for Clearwire. After the initial Clearwire deal didn’t work out they also went directly after Sprint, however Japanese telecom giant Softbank actually ended up buying Spring.

Now, multiple sites are reporting that Dish is mulling over the idea of also putting a bid in for T-Mobile.  The Star Online reports that Dish continues to try and break into the wireless industry and beyond the satellite television space. Dish has also stockpiled billions of dollars in spectrum that means the company either needs to find an acquisition, like T-Mobile, or essentially start their own network of some kind.

To many analysts a Dish-T-Mobile merger would get through the regulatory process quicker. Dish jumping in to buy T-Mobile would leave the other 3 carriers untouched.