Speculations as to what happened could have been this – someone over at Softbank, coincidentally the majority owner of Sprint, phoned a friend who knew someone at The Journal, and decided to mention something that pointed out that at least a suit in Softbank could be mulling over the inclusion of T-Mobile to Softbank’s companies. Other than that, there has been nothing remotely concrete for such a story to turn up. Why a trial balloon? Well, it is useful to see what kind of reaction that the rest of the world would show, ranging from competitors to shareholders and the government, of course, should such a merger be actually proposed and go through.