AT&T announced Sunday that it intends to pay nearly $50 billion for DirecTV in a move that alters the landscape for the 2015 FCC spectrum auction.

If regulators approve the deal, AT&T expects it to be completed by the end of the year. All in all, the deal is valued at around $67 billion when the fact that AT&T will absorb DirecTV's debt as well is taken into account. The new combined AT&T-DirecTV company would the second-largest television provider in the United States behind Comcast-Time Warner.

Such a player would certainly be a force to be reckoned with during next year's auction for new bandwidth.

The FCC will be selling off new spectrum holdings in mid-2015, an event that is expected to set the landscape in the U.S. wireless market for years to come. Major carriers AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile are all set to participate.

At stake is the coveted 600MHz low frequency spectrum. Low frequency spectrums are valuable to carriers because they travel further and allow for cheaper upgrading. They are, however, worse in denser urban areas.

It's become painfully obvious that the deep pockets of AT&T and Verizon could easily outbid Sprint and T-Mobile, skewing the U.S. mobile market even more. In light of this, the FCC recently passed some rules stating that if the auction raises $7 billion for a new public safety station and enough money to pay back the TV stations that provided the spectrum, they would reserve a certain amount for smaller carriers. The rules do not set well with AT&T and Verizon.

The rules, however, were drawn up based on current market conditions -- something that will definitely change should AT&T acquire DirecTV. While AT&T is the largest wireless provider whether or not the deal goes through, regulatory approval could set off other deals, namely a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile.

The third-largest U.S. carrier Sprint and its parent company SoftBank have been pushing for regulatory approval to acquire No. 4 T-Mobile. The FCC and U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division, however, are wary of consolidating the wireless market from four to three major carriers. Sprint and T-Mobile argue that unless they can scale up with combined resources, the biggest are just going to get bigger while the small get left behind.

"If the government wants us to have a competitive environment, you are going to make sure that the duopoly doesn't use their prowess to crush the little guys and have this sub-1 GHz spectrum be moved all to them," said T-Mobile CEO John Legere in an interview on television show "Bloomberg West" earlier this year.

"We're all going to need better scale and capability. The question starts to be, how do you take the maverick and supercharge it? We either need more spectrum and capability, a lot more investment, or we need consolidation."

A Sprint and T-Mobile merger would also cause the FCC to rethink setting aside spectrum reserves.

Could a combined AT&T and DirecTV company cause regulators to approve a deal for Sprint to acquire T-Mobile? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

For more stories like this, follow us on Twitter!