Which means that Charlie may never get into the cell phone business at all then, if no t-mobile. I guess that means a sell out to someone else or a merger with Directv -if it is allowed this time.
Of course he does not have to buy all of T-Mobile. He could negotiate a stake in T-Mobile with Deutsche Telekom and use the few billion in spectrum he has as part of the deal. This could give him access to towers and he could also handle some of the backhaul with the nationwide fiber optic network Dish has assembled over the years.
As far as partnering with Sprint, he has probably locked him self out of the picture for a while after costing Softbank billions by forcing Softbank to bid a lot more for Sprint/Clearwire.