A Sprint and T-Mobile merger deal is beginning to look likely as Sprint's parent company SoftBank pushes for more financing and the two companies plan a $10 billion warchest for next year's FCC spectrum auction.

SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son is currently in the process of talking to banks for financing for the $32 billion acquisition over a longer period of time than originally discussed. The reason? Given the amount of mergers and T-Mobile's ongoing lawsuit with the FCC, the regulatory review process is going to take quite some time and be quite stringent. Sprint had already reportedly reached an agreement with banks for financing the takeover back in late June.

Sprint, notably Son, has been slowly stating its case for joining forces with T-Mobile over the course of the year. Son has repeatedly expressed his distaste at the current state of the U.S. wireless market and insists that Sprint needs more scale and deeper pockets to compete with the top two wireless carriers in the United States: Verizon and AT&T.

Verizon currently boasts around 122 million subscribers, followed by AT&T with 116 million. Sprint is the third-largest carrier with roughly 55 million, and T-Mobile rounds out the four major national wireless providers with 50 million. Even after combining, Sprint and T-Mobile would have 10 million less than AT&T, stark evidence of the huge gap that currently exists.

"If you have more customers, you can afford to build a larger network," Sprint CEO Dan Hesse told CNET in an interview. "Only then do you have the revenue to justify building in smaller suburbs and rural areas.

"If you live in an urban core, you will have access to AT&T and Verizon, and you'll also likely have access to T-Mobile and Sprint. But when you go to less populated areas, Sprint and T-Mobile might not be there."

Even if a deal is reached between the two companies (it looks highly likely) U.S. regulators from the FCC and U.S. Department of Justice are skeptical that reducing the number of major national carriers from four to three will help consumers. Less carriers means less competition means higher prices for customers -- right? Not necessarily; in fact, some analysts have shown that in countries such as the Netherlands, Greece and Austria, average pricing dropped when the number of carriers went from four to three.

"I brought the network war and price war [to Japan]. I'd like to bring that to the States," Son said to industry officials in March. "I would like to provide an alternative to the oligopolistic situation that two-thirds of American households can only get access to one or two providers. I'd like to be a third alternative with 10 times the speed and lower price."

And this is where next year's auction comes in. In mid-2015 the FCC will auction off airwaves for wireless use, and among them will be coveted low frequency spectrums, which are valuable when looking to expand in rural areas. New reports indicate that Sprint and T-Mobile are planning on a $10 billion joint venture for the auction, an amount that would help them supercede AT&T's $9 billion budget for the auction. Unlike the past, where AT&T and Verizon were able to gobble up frequencies and grow at an unmatched pace, Sprint and T-Mobile are definitely looking to come out on top in 2015, and they look willing to do it together. The joint venture is a contigency plan in case the merger deal is still pending and could change over the course of the next few months.

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