Deutsche Telekom's announcement of its plan to merge T-Mobile and MetroPCS came as a slight surprise earlier this week. The companies have already signed an agreement worth $1.5 billion to merge MetroPCS into T-Mobile, which makes Sprint's alleged plans fairly suspect. Bloomberg cites other sources that claim Deutsche Telekom is prepared to handle a counter bid from Sprint, however, so this may be something that the companies expected would happen. Should MetroPCS bow out of its deal with T-Mobile, it would be forced to pay a $150 million break up fee, while T-Mobile would have to cough up $250 million if it were to back out. As it stands now, if the merger is approved by regulators, T-Mobile will use MetroPCS' spectrum to build out its LTE network, though that won't happen until 2015.