French telecom group Iliad, which owns Europe’s largest IPTV operator Free, has taken out a syndicated loan for a little over 1 billion euros ($1.6 billion), to help finance their purchase of Alice, Italia Telecom’s competing internet TV player in France, reports Variety. Iliad announced it was in negotiations with Italia Telecom in early June, but the two have yet to seal the deal.

The purchase would increase Iliad’s penetration of the French market by adding Alice’s 850,000 subscribers to its base of 2.5 million IPTV enabled homes and estimated 1.4 million home connections. Alice is valued at $1.3 billion, including debt. The loan isn’t supposed to close for another few weeks, so the merger obviously won’t happen till after that.