Despite regulatory hurdles, Sprint and T-Mobile have reportedly agreed on a $32 billion merger, hoping that the trend of consolidation in the telecommunications industry will help the deal go through.

The agreement means Sprint would pay $40 for each T-Mobile share and the deal will most likely be announced this summer. Neither Sprint nor T-Mobile have commented publicly on the matter and the information comes via "people briefed on the matter" who spoke to the Wall Street Journal and other news agencies such as the New York Times. If and when the deal goes through, eccentric T-Mobile CEO John Legere is widely expected to head the new company.

SoftBank CEO and Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son has vocally expressed Sprint's desire to acquire T-Mobile in recent months, but has hit regulatory roadblocks. Both the FCC and Department of Justice's antitrust division have said they are wary of consolidating the national U.S. wireless service industry from four major carriers to three. But recent developments in the sector give Sprint and T-Mobile an opening, especially when the 2015 FCC spectrum auction is taken into consideration.

"The regulation in this country is wrong," Son said at the recent Recode Code Conference, adding that although the United States invented the Internet, broadband speeds in the country are ranked 15 out of the top 16 countries in the world.

Thanks to the Time Warner and Comcast merger and AT&T buying out DirecTV, it'll be hard for regulators to make a convincing case against Sprint joining hands with T-Mobile. Consolidation is happening in the telecommunications industry due to the fact companies want to provide a broader range of services and integrate people's lifestyles. The Sprint and T-Mobile is nowhere near as big as the other two, and it'll be interesting to note what government officials have to say about the matter now.

The desire to merge stems from the need for more scale and deeper pockets to compete with the No. 1 and No. 2 carriers that are AT&T and Verizon. For a size comparison, even if Sprint and T-Mobile combined their subscriber base, it would still be smaller than AT&T's alone.

"I brought the network war and price war [to Japan]. I'd like to bring that to the States," Son said at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 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."

"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."

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