Alltel’s (NYSE: AT) CEO Scott Ford said in an interview with the Arkansas News Bureau that a carrier must be nationwide in order to be relevant in today’s industry, and to rectify that, during his tenure as the chief executive at the fifth largest U.S. carrier, he tried to buy Sprint (NYSE: S), T-Mobile and even AT&T (NYSE: T) Wireless. Of course, a lot of the talk also focused on the company’s $28.1 billion sale to Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ), and how it came only eight months after the company went private. See the entire interview here.

Here’s the exact wording of Ford’s comments about trying to buy the competition:

Ford: “I didn’t get to buy one of the national businesses, which is what I had hoped to be able to do and was something that we had tried in our old [business], back when we were a public business. I won’t go into the details of it, but we tried to buy Sprint three times, we tried to buy AT&T Wireless, we tried to buy T-Mobile. Some of these times we went with partners, some of these times we didn’t. We were doing everything we could to get to a national platform. I knew we had a great team. I didn’t know they were as good as anybody was going to find in the world, but I knew we had a great team, and I wanted to get them to a national platform. The economies of our industry dictate you have to have a national platform, I mean, I can’t do anything about that. Long term, you’ve got to be a national player or you’re going to get not only suboptimal returns, you’re going to get in some instances negative returns. There are companies that are experiencing that. So we were doing everything we could to get to a national platform, and I had hoped that we would get to a place where we could get, you know, Sprint or T-Mobile. And the credit markets fell apart and Sprint fell in the tank almost right on cue, they fell so totally apart that there wasn’t really an opportunity to go get them either.”

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