T-Mobile and MetroPCS will be joining forces. The two mobile providers today announced their intent to become one. The merger will see both companies keep the T-Mobile name going forward. The transaction was unanimously approved by MetroPCS and T-Mobile’s board members.

The deal should be finalized at some point in the first half of 2013. MetroPCS shareholders still have to approve the deal before it can be 100 percent final. This deal is expected to cause substantial growth for T-Mobile; according to their release, they should see growth of 3% to 5% for revenues, 7% to 10% for EBITDA and 15% to 20% for free cash flow.

The two companies combined are expected to have approximately 42.5 million subscribers and $24.8 billion of revenue. According to the two companies, this deal should create “enhanced customer experience through a wider selection of affordable products and services, deeper network coverage and a clear-cut technology path to one common LTE network.”

The endgame for T-Mobile with this deal is to better compete with mobile giants like AT&T and Verizon. They have a much smaller customer base than some other US carriers, but with this merger, they could find themselves in a much more competitive position. They believe they will “have the expanded scale, spectrum and financial resources to aggressively compete with the other national U.S. wireless carriers.”