Sprint Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Gary Forsee said last week that the company’s highly anticipated sale of its more than 6,200 wireless towers could be completed by the end of this year, and that the company was moving aggressively on its deployment of high-speed wireless data capabilities.
“[The tower sale] process is under way at this time,” Forsee said during Goldman Sachs Communacopia XIII Conference in New York. “We expect by the end of this year or early next year to have come to a conclusion one way or the other about that.”
Industry sources noted in August that Sprint was moving closer to a possible sale of its tower assets, and the company had begun offering its tower “book” to potential suitors. The most often-mentioned bidders for the sites include AAT Communications Corp., American Tower Corp. and Crown Castle International Corp., with rapidly growing Global Signal Inc. as an outside candidate.
Analysts have pegged the expected selling price for the towers at more than $1 billion, which Sprint has said it would use to help reduce its more than $15 billion in debt. Sprint’s decision to sell its tower assets follows similar moves by Alltel Corp., Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and Verizon Wireless, which then leased back space on the towers. Nextel Communications Inc. and AT&T Wireless Services Inc., which is in the process of being acquired by Cingular, still own substantial tower portfolios. If Sprint feels it does not get full value for its tower assets, the company could hang onto the properties.
While Sprint is taking a pensive approach to its tower assets, Forsee said the company was moving aggressively in deploying CDMA2000 1x EV-DO capabilities on its network, and that it could have most major markets covered by the high-speed wireless data service within a year.
“We have told our partners to go as hard as they can in deploying EV-DO,” Forsee said. “We want to hang onto our strategic position in the wireless data space.”
Forsee explained that strong customer acceptance of its CDMA2000 1x-based PCS Vision wireless data service drove the company’s decision earlier this year to deploy EV-DO technology between six months and a year earlier than it originally had planned to deploy a high-speed wireless upgrade.
The company was looking at upgrading its network with EV-DV technology, which would have allowed the carrier to serve both voice and data traffic in the same spectrum as opposed to the data-only capabilities of EV-DO. But the carrier decided to move ahead with EV-DO technology, as EV-DV was not expected to be available until 2006 at the earliest.
Analysts have noted that Sprint’s aggressive approach to EV-DO could cut Verizon Wireless’ first-to-market advantage in large markets with high-speed wireless data services from more than a year to around nine months. Verizon Wireless recently expanded its EV-DO deployment to 14 markets across the country as well as 11 additional airport locations, and Verizon Wireless said it expects to have two-thirds of its network EV-DO enabled by the end of next year.
“Verizon has less time to capitalize on EV-DO the faster Sprint moves into the market,” noted American Technology Research analyst Albert Lin.
Forsee also said Sprint is continuing to look at offering advanced 802.16 or WiMax-based mobile broadband services using its substantial MMDS spectrum, but it “did not want to go into it as the third alternative to DSL and cable” offerings.
“We continue to look at [mobile broadband] and working with companies that have a similar view,” Forsee added.
