ATT and T-Mobile’s corporate parent, Deutsche Telekom, acknowledged that the deal was in trouble in a Thanksgiving Day announcement. The companies said they had withdrawn, for now, their application to the Federal Communications Commission to join their cellphone operations. They also said that ATT would take a $4 billion charge against earnings — the amount in breakup fees owed to Deutsche Telekom if the deal is scrapped.
The companies portrayed the withdrawal of the F.C.C. application as a tactical move, after the commission chairman said earlier in the week that he would move to oppose the deal. The Justice Department filed an antitrust suit to block the merger in August.
Focusing on the antitrust trial, scheduled for February, the companies explained, would now be the first step. They vowed to continue to pursue their bold plan to combine the second- and fourth-largest cellphone carriers in the United States.
But the companies’ ambitions must be scaled back if they want any chance at a deal, analysts say. To address the objections of the Justice Department and F.C.C. that a merger would be anticompetitive, ATT could agree to sell off 40 percent or so T-Mobile’s assets to wireless rivals, they say.
The policy goal, analysts say, would be to strengthen wireless competitors beyond the big two, Verizon Wireless and ATT. So sales of mobile spectrum, cell towers and customers could not be made to Verizon, but to others, like Sprint and MetroPCS, the third- and fifth-largest carriers.
Or perhaps assets could be sold to a well-heeled foreign company that, unlike Deutsche Telekom, is increasing its investment in the United States: América Móvil, headed by the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú. Mr. Slim is a major shareholder in The New York Times Company.
Creative deal-making, analysts note, would be required to forge alliances and supply cash for spinoff purchases. The list of potential participants, they say, includes private equity firms, like SilverLake Partners, and cable companies, like Comcast and Time Warner, which own spectrum and whose Wi-Fi networks can work in tandem with cell networks.
Each of the options would present obstacles. And it is not clear that ATT would be interested in a drastically scaled-down deal. Yet the company has consistently argued that its main motivation for pursuing T-Mobile is to acquire scarce wireless spectrum, so ATT can quickly build out high-speed, next-generation network capacity to improve its service.
“If that is its goal, then ATT has to explore ways to salvage as much spectrum out of the deal as it can,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a former technology policy official at the F.C.C.
To sell off 40 percent of T-Mobile’s assets, ATT would most likely have to make peace with rivals who have opposed the merger, like Sprint and MetroPCS, and offer these carriers favorable terms, said Kevin Smithen, an analyst at Macquarie Securities.
“The issue for ATT is whether gaining some market share and spectrum is worth handing over some of T-Mobile’s assets to the struggling third and fifth carriers,” Mr. Smithen said.
Private equity firms, analysts say, would mainly be interested in providing financing for others to buy spectrum assets, or in buying some assets and then reselling them. Such investment funds, they add, are not in the business of running companies.
América Móvil in Mexico is a candidate to buy T-Mobile assets, according to Berge Ayvazian, a telecommunications consultant. The company’s TracFone unit, which sells a flat-rate, prepaid service called Straight Talk, has been rapidly adding subscribers in the United States.
“The result,” Mr. Ayvazian said, “would be a healthy company that is growing around the world and in the United States, becoming the No. 4 competitor in this market.”
But other analysts noted that América Móvil, with its prepaid service, is a very different business than the traditional model of signing up subscribers on two-year contracts.
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