The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved the merger between T-Mobile and MetroPCS. This news comes in follow-up to the thumbs up that we recently saw coming from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and ahead of the shareholder vote. MetroPCS has a shareholder meeting schooled for April 12 and have already pushed for approval noting that if the stockholders were to vote against, they could make “no assurance that MetroPCS will be able to deliver the same or better stockholder value.”

Putting that aside until April 12, lets continue focus on the FCC approval. This approval came with mention that “the transaction will serve the public interest” with mention of a more robust national network and improved quality of service. Perhaps slightly more to the point here, the FCC report also made mention that “the transaction is not likely to result generally in competitive or other public interest harms.”

Some of the potential benefits cited by the FCC include how this will allow for “expansion of the MetroPCS brand into new geographical markets,” and that the merger will help in the “strengthening of the fourth largest nationwide service provider’s ability to compete in the mobile broadband services market.” For those who are still worried about the possible bad side effects. The FCC has said that “any potential public interest harms would be outweighed by the resulting public interest benefits.”

Aside from the FCC report, Chairman Julius Genachowski said that with today’s approval “America’s mobile market continues to strengthen, moving toward robust competition and revitalized competitors.” Basically, the T-Mobile MetroPCS merger is still moving forward. Anyway, assuming that the MetroPCS shareholder vote ends on a merger approving note, both carriers would then be expecting the deal to finalize and close sometime in the first half of 2013 with a full migration of MetroPCS customers (to T-Mobile) by 2015.

[via FCC]

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