NEW YORK — Verizon is near a deal to buy Alltel for about $27 billion, including the assumption of debt, creating the nation’s largest cellphone provider, people involved in the negotiations said. A deal could be announced as early as today.
That would catapult Verizon ahead of AT&T, which would fall to No. 2 ahead of Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. A Verizon-Alltel combination would have more than 80 million subscribers using the same network technology.
The deal would be one of the quickest flips in corporate history: Alltel’s owners — TPG and Goldman Sachs’ private-equity arm — just completed buying the company last fall for about $27.5 billion. It would be the biggest telecom deal since AT&T bought BellSouth at the end of 2006. The New York Times
