According to a Wednesday disclosure by two unidentified Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officials, the commission has approved Verizon Wireless' $3.6 billion purchase of spectrum from leading US cable operators, by voting 5-0 vote in favor of the deal.

The unanimous vote by the FCC members will pave the way for Verizon's purchase of unused airwaves from the SpectrumCo cable group which include bigwig cable providers Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox and Bright House Networks; and also from Leap Wireless.

The approval of the Verizon/SpectrumCo deal by the FCC is apparently an upshot of the fact that the agency's Chairman Julius Genachowski, asked fellow commissioners to approve the deal in a last-week statement, saying that Verizon had agreed to sell some airwaves and to speed up the building out of some frequencies while its was seeking regulatory approval.

Moreover, as per the information shared by the FCC officials, the Verizon/SpectrumCo order - which will soon be released - also approves the Verizon deal pertaining to spinning off part of its acquired spectrum to T-Mobile. In fact, the spin-off of the spectrum to T-Mobile is one of the key conditions of approval of the deal.

The FCC's approval of Verizon's spectrum deal comes close on the heels of the August 16 antitrust approval which the transaction and its supplementary cooperation agreements won from the US Department of Justice.