T-Mobile might have finished 2014 strong, but parent company Deutsche Telekom's CEO Tim Hoettges still believes that a merger with Sprint is necessary to catch up to giants Verizon and AT&T.

Speaking to Re/code at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, Hoettges said that more scale is needed to bridge the gap between the top two and bottom two major national carriers in the U.S. wireless market.

"I was intrigued by the idea of having a combination with Sprint and being the 'super-maverick' in the market," Hoettges told Re/code. "I hope that the political environment will change at one point in time."

Sprint and its parent company, the Japan-based SoftBank, aggressively pursued a bid for T-Mobile in 2014, and while progress was made, the deal eventually fell through due to regulatory concerns. The FCC in particular was wary of reducing competition in the market from four major players to three.

"I brought the network war and price war [to Japan]. I'd like to bring that to the States," Sprint parent company SoftBank Corp.'s chief executive Masayoshi Son said to industry officials in March last year.

"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."

Hoettges also mentioned that, despite the recent gains T-Mobile has made, it isn't sustainable, especially given the fact that T-Mobile needs to invest around $5 billion a year to keep up. T-Mobile, in particular, has shaken up the wireless industry with a series of "Un-carrier" moves like doing away with contracts and reducing wait times between phone upgrades.

"The question is always the economics in the long term ... and earning appropriate money," Hoettges said. "You have to earn your money back at one point in time."

Part of the problem lies with T-Mobile's footprint, which is paltry, especially in rural and suburban areas, compared to Verizon and AT&T. In order to expand coverage, however, T-Mobile needs more spectrum -- a process made harder by the large pockets and scale of the bigger carriers.

"If you have more customers, you can afford to build a larger network," former Sprint CEO Dan Hesse told CNET last year 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."

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