Thanks to Jamie for sending me the update on Sprint’s latest purchase. Apparently they have an agreement to acquire Northern PCS Services, LLC, for $312.5 million, including the assumption of debt. (The purchase needs to be approved and should be next quarter – but this is the plan.)

Here’s a bit of info on Northern PCS gleaned from the Sprint press release:

Northern PCS, based in Waite Park, Minnesota, provides Sprint PCS services in certain small to mid-size markets in Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Iowa, serving more than 167,000 direct wireless subscribers and more than 69,000 reseller subscribers in a coverage area of more than 1.8 million people. It employs about 240 people and had revenues for the twelve months ended December 31, 2006 of $130 million.

Sprint has acquired 6 similar small market affiliates in the last 2 years or so. Apparently Sprint has purchased affiliates who were unhappy with issues of competition; buying the companies has helped them avoid lawsuits – or so I learned from Xchange Online. I haven’t been able to find much more.

The Northern PCS domain name now points to Sprint, admittedly I don’t know if it always has. Darn, sometimes the purchased companies. On a tangent – I looked them up on the WayBack Machine (which archived many, many web sites and all I could find was their statistics page from 2002.) Hmmm – makes me want to check out more archived pages – if only I could see more recent stats.