Thats just an analyst, He is making a guess. There is factual evidence this is happening. Also that analyst is going by publicly available information, not the stuff we hear leaked from the inside.
This news was NOT from the dealer conference as I am not a dealer, A person I know was one of the people that got laid off. Also the people that got laid off were mostly the people that service the networks and pc's for all of the corp. locations. They plan on outsourcing it all to a national computer service firm. When you have no IT and your a telco provider that makes you look either to cheap to be a viable company, or just plain old stupid.
The other thing that makes me believe that a mergers coming soon is that cricket is closing 2 corp stores in a market near me. From what I am hearing they plan on eventually replacing all of the corp stores in some markets with something called a Cricket "elite" dealer. It's basicly a privately owned corporate style store. e.g. Ins. Claims, warranty swaps, etc. This option will only be available to existing tier 5 dealers.