As hopes of a Sprint and T-Mobile merger continue to slowly dwindle, executives from wireless networks Verizon and T-Mobile headed to Washington to testify on the wireless marketplace and its competitive nature. The results? Once again T-Mobile asserted that it needs to scale up in order to better compete against the larger carriers while Verizon continues to assert that the U.S. telecom industry is a great as is.

Sprint and T-Mobile are currently the third-largest and fourth-largest networks in the U.S. wireless market, standings that don't tell the whole story. Even after combining customer bases, the Sprint/T-Mobile network would still be smaller than the second-largest carrier in the United States, AT&T.

It's this kind of gap that drives Sprint and T-Mobile's arguments that they need to combine forces in order to better compete with the two juggernauts they have dubbed a "duopoly."

"T-Mobile faces a number of fundamental challenges that put at risk its ability to maintain its disruptive presence in the marketplace," T-Mobile's vice president of federal regulatory affairs Kathleen O'Brien Ham said during the Senate Judiciary Committee's Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on competitiveness in the wireless market.

"Our subscribers base is still nowhere near that of AT&T or Verizon, and their greater numbers give these carriers significant access to capital and economy-of-scale advantages. ... We're doing our darnedest to compete."

Japanese-based SoftBank Corp., the owner of Sprint, agrees.

"Without industry consolidation, for Sprint alone to become No. 1 in the U.S. is literally just a dream. I'm not content for Sprint to remain No. 3 because if we could grow bigger, we will offer aggressive discounts and services, just like we did in Japan," Masayoshi Son, the president of Japan-based SoftBank Corp., said during the recent Sprint quarterly earnings report.

"There is a huge gap between the bigger two and the smaller two, thus the level of competition isn't sound or strong."

Of course, Verizon, with its position at the top of the totem pole disagrees. Although Big Red has been relatively mum on the prospect of a Sprint and T-Mobile merger, the network came out testifying it believes the current telecom industry model is fine as is.

"The beneficiaries of this remarkable marketplace are U.S. wireless consumers, who have a wide range of choices in networks," Verizon Wireless' executive vice president and general counsel Randal Milch told the antitrust committee.

"Our U.S. wireless market stands as a global leader in innovation and choice, and is a key driver for national economic growth and maintaining America's competitive edge in the global economy."

Milch reiterated that there's more to the market than just a huge gap in customer bases. U.S. wireless companies spent $34 billion in investments in 2013 alone, and it's these kinds of numbers that are a much more effective way of measuring the current market model's effectiveness, according to Milch.

"This level of investment is on average four times more per subscriber than anywhere else in the world," Milch said.

"Much of this sustained investment of late has been targeted for deployment of 4G LTE mobile broadband networks, which provide consumers and businesses with true broadband speeds in a mobile environment. As a result of U.S. carriers' investment in 4G LTE, the United States has almost 300 million wireless broadband subscriptions, more than double that of any other country."

Sprint faces major opposition from antitrust committees in the United States as well as the Federal Communications Commissions in its bid to acquire T-Mobile despite having received a fairly positive response from banks concerning financing.

What do you think? Would the consolidation of Sprint and T-Mobile lead to better prices and options for consumers? Or would having only three major national carriers instead of four hurt the industry in the long run? Let us know in the comments section below.