Leap Wireless stays on track with its buildout, hits the Cheese-Heads

Leap Wireless International Inc. is expanding service to Milwaukee, Wisc.. Starting tomorrow, Leap’s Cricket Communications Inc. service will be available in the greater Milwaukee area, including the cities of Racine, Kenosha and Madison, bringing Leap’s total national covered population to 64.1 million. It’s coverage in this new area covers 3,390 square miles and 2.4 million pops.
“Launching service in southern Wisconsin is our first step toward building a significant Cricket footprint in the upper Midwest, which will ultimately include coverage stretching from Milwaukee to Chicago, a market that is scheduled to launch in the first half of next year,” said Doug Hutcheson, Leap’s president and CEO. “We are pleased to provide residents with a contract-free, no-credit-check wireless service, as well as create more than 200 new jobs in the market. We believe that people will see the extraordinary value in both our wireless voice and broadband service offerings.”
The move to the Midwest is an integral part of Leap’s planned nationwide coverage. The carrier is in the works of doubling its covered pops to 50 million by 2010. Expansion expenses took a toll on Leap’s third-quarter results, but the carrier did add 92,000 new customers in recently launched markets.
Leap also announced recently that it entered an agreement with competitor MetroPCS Communications Inc. to offer free roaming on each others networks, a helpful tool in its network rollout.