Why does AT&T need to gobble up T-Mobile? It’s all about dropped calls on the iPhone and the sick amount of data the iPad is slurping up, AT&T argues in their latest filing with the FCC.

Although the T-Mobile USA may not begin selling the iPhone for at least another year, across the ‘pond’, T-Mobile UK plans to offer a subsidized version of the iPad 2 Friday. The 16GB Wi-Fi and 3G iPad 2 will sell for $322 and $370, respectively, according to a Thursday report.

A two-year contract will be required for the 16GB Wi-Fi or 3G tablet. No 32GB or 64GB iPad 2 version will be available, the report says. Existing T-Mobile UK customers must pay $40 per month and a $322 initial payment, while new customers pay $43 and $370, respectively.

AT&T’s proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile would result in new efficiencies and economies of scale. It would enable the provisioning of more and better services at lower cost than the two companies could achieve separately.

And that’s exactly why the Obama administration may block it.

Yes, the iPhone won’t officially be available to T-Mobile users until at least 12 months, when government regulators are expected to give thumbs-up (or thumbs-down) on the $39 billion acquisition by AT&T. However, that hasn’t stopped Wall Street experts from weighing-in on the possible impact. Depending on who you ask, the deal could be a huge, or minor, plus for Apple.

“We believe T-Mobile could add [around] 3 million incremental iPhones in its first full year, which could be conservative,” Bank of American analyst Scott Craig told investors Monday morning. If you don’t like that view, there is another.

The clock is ticking for Sprint, the only U.S. carrier that hasn’t established a way to eventually offer the iPhone. First, there was only AT&T, then Verizon and now potentially T-Mobile USA, if a $39 billion acquisition by AT&T is approved. Although T-Mobile says it won’t offer the Apple handset for around 12 months, Sprint is already calling ‘foul.’

“The merger would result in a wireless industry dominated overwhelmingly by two vertically-integrated companies that control almost 80 percent of the U.S. wireless post-paid market, as well as the availability and price of key inputs such as backhaul and access needed by other wireless companies to compete,” Sprint bemoaned in a statement.

AT&T’s $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile might have you hopeful that the iPhone will be coming to T-Mobile customers soon. T-Mobile themselves want to set you right on the matter, though:

T-Mobile USA remains an independent company. The acquisition is expected to be completed in approximately 12 months. We do not offer the iPhone. We offer cutting edge devices like the Samsung Galaxy S 4G and coming soon our new Sidekick 4G.

In other words, don’t expect T-Mobile to get the iPhone until at least 2012, and even then, T-Mobile stores won’t suddenly become AT&T stores: T-Mobile will work as an independent company within AT&T, and have their own handsets. If the iPhone comes to T-Mobile, it won’t just roll out automatically to customers by dint of AT&T being the parent company.

On an ancillary note, check out this quote on the rationale of T-Mobile’s decision to be acquired by AT&T:

Bringing together these two world-class businesses will create significant benefits for customers. The merger will ensure the deployment of a robust 4G LTE network to 95% of the U.S. population, something neither company would achieve on its own.

This is interesting. It’s T-Mobile and AT&T admitting that their current “4G” offerings are nothing of the sort. While both T-Mobile and AT&T are calling their HSPA+ service “4G” when it’s really just faster 3G, and far inferior to the likes of Sprint’s WiMax or Verizon’s LTE. In fact, AT&T’s 4G smartphones are actually slower at data transfer than the iPhone 4, which is a decidedly 3G handset!

T-Mobile and AT&T seem to both be admitting that unless they work together, they simply don’t have any hope of catching up with Verizon’s LTE deployment. Together, though, they can blanket most of the country in GSM LTE in a shorter period of time. If there’s any bright side to any of this, it’s that at least T-Mobile and AT&T will both stop lying to customers about what 4G means.

AT&T just bought T-Mobile USA for $39 billion so there are now only three major mobile carriers in the US – AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.

Both carriers use the same technologies: GSM, HSPA+ and LTE. AT&T Mobile will become a monopoly for GSM cellular services in the US.

This doesn’t bode well for consumers who will now only have one GSM carrier to choose from and one less carrier for anyone to choose from.

AT&T will become the largest US cellular carrier surpassing Verizon by a nice margin based on an estimated number of subscribers at Verizon as 94 million. Purchasing  T-Mobile will add about 34 million subscribers to AT&T’s 96 million creating a subscriber base of approximately 130 million for the combined carrier.

It also looks like T-Mobile subscribers will finally get a chance at owning an iPhone. In the last few months, the iPhone has gone from one carrier to all the major carriers except Sprint.

During a presentation to investors in New York on Thursday, T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm put an explicit percentage on the so-called iPhone effect: how many T-Mobile subscribers leave every month for AT&T just because of Apple’s smartphone.

According to Humm, the churn rate — or number of contract customers lost per month — is sitting at 2 percent right now. Of that 2% leaving the network, a full ten percent are because customers want the iPhone.

To counter, Humm says that T-Mobile will launch a line of sub-$100 Android smartphones with subscription plans starting at just $10 a month. That doesn’t exactly sound like the plan of a company that thinks it’s going to get the iPhone any time soon, does it?

Worse, it reeks of desperation: you can’t retain customers you’re losing for lack of the best handset on Earth by offering them a cheap deal on some of the crummiest.

T-Mobile has hinted it may be the third U.S. wireless carrier to get the iPhone.

“Ask Apple,” said T-Mobile executives when asked whether it was getting the iPhone 4 at a press conference in New York today, according to Electronista.

Though neither confirming or denying, T-Mobile’s answer suggests that talks between the carrier and Apple are ongoing. Verizon used similar language in the run up to its announcement that it would be carrying the iPhone.

One issue that T-Mobile did discuss was the readiness of the iPhone’s radio chips. To work on T-Mobile’s network, the iPhone would have to support the 1,700MHz 3G band.

T-Mobile president Philipp Humm said while the current iPhone isn’t compatible with T-Mobile’s network, future 3G chips would support more cellular frequencies.

“We’re not part of the [iPhone] chipset today,” president Philipp Humm said. “But we have chipsets which support five, or up to 10 spectrum bands in the market, so we should expect there will be more degrees of freedom going forward.”

T-Mobile may be eyeing the iPhone 5, which is rumored to have a dual-mode chipset from Qualcomm with both CDMA and GSM. If it includes both 850MHz and 1,700MHz, Apple could produce a single phone that works on almost all carriers.

Details may remain sketchy on the special event T-Mobile has scheduled for sometime in the coming weeks but the #4 carrier in the US wasted no time cranking up a new ad that riffs on the old “upstarts are cool – Big Guys are stodgy” meme that Apple has used for years to poke fun at Microsoft.

The ad should start running on US television networks next week, according to a report at TechCrunch.