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.
good report ann
Thanks to Jamie for sending another article on Sprint:
http://www.wimax.com/commentary/blog/blog-2007/sprint-and-clearwire-in-jv
In the article Frank Ohrtman, WiMax advocate talks about a recent annoucemnet in the Wall St Journal that Sprint Nextel might spin off its WiMAX unit to Clearwire thus exiting its previously announced plans to offer WiMAX to 100 million Americans by Christmas 2008.
Ok ann im just going to open a can of worms here on this as we are near ready to announce our wimax services to be placed starting the end of august i will send you more specific info on this and we hope to be able to hit areas in need with the deployment .Our deployments are to hit rural midwest and central states.
That’s exciting! I have been touring Todd County for the last few days and it’s been great to hear how many folks do have access to some sort of broadband – but people are talking about needing higher bandwidths and I’ve been a little surprised at the prices some people are paying.
I’m hoping to write more about my trip tomorrow – after a good night of sleep!
its fun touring areas and finding there needs.I just completed the nxtcomm conference in chicago seeing what the future of technology holds and everything points at mobility and wireless technologies.And its nice people are now getting more chances for broadband which is my goal and to offer it at affordable prices