Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Apr. 25, 2008

NextWave Wireless says it no longer needs all the wireless spectrum it acquired several years ago and said it now wants to sell parts of it.

The company has spectrum in three bands – 1.7 GHz, 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz – that it says covers 251 million people in major U.S. markets.

It has retained Deutsche Bank and UBS Investment Bank to help it sell the spectrum, and to consider other alternatives if it needs to.

Roy Berger, executive vice president of corporate communications, says NextWave never wanted to become an operator by using the spectrum for itself. He says the company wanted to package the spectrum with some of its products, which include WiMAX and RF chipsets, multiband td-CDMA, WiMAX and LTE base station platforms and its MXtv and TDtv mobile TV systems.

CEO Allen Salmasi says NextWave has received several unsolicited offers for its U.S. spectrum assets since the conclusion of the recent 700 MHz FCC auction. That auction raised almost $20 billion.

Once the 700 MHz auction was over, Berger says NextWave started receiving calls from unspecified prospective buyers. He says NextWave believes its spectrum in the higher frequencies might be of interest to operators “or new entrants” that might want to pair 700 MHz with the higher spectrum.

Overall, the 700 MHz spectrum is great for propagation while the higher bands are great for capacity, he says.

Berger says that now those products have created enough positive interest on their own that NextWave no longer sees the need to package the spectrum with them. He didn’t say how such a package might have worked, only that there were multiple ways of doing it.

NextWave also owned spectrum in Europe and South America but Berger says the company has no plans to sell those holdings, at least not in the short term.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

    This article was featured on Business 5.0.

Source: NextWave.