In a press release this morning, Sprint has announced the sale of 3,300 CDMA, WiMax, and iDEN cellsites to TowerCo. for $670 million in cash with a secondary long-term leasing arrangement whereby TowerCo will provide the infrastructure necessary for Sprint to operate its wireless service operations while also handling maintenance and other logistical functions unrelated to Sprint’s core business as a service provider.
The fleet of personnel maintained by Sprint for cellsite maintenance is expected to be shuffled around while Sprint gains much needed capital, which it sought through this transaction. The sale is expected to be completed in three months from the date of first announcement.
I’m a huge Sprint fan, so this may be good or bad. Good in the sense that maintaining a cell site is more expensive than just leasing it, so wit this infusion of cash they can start fixing other areas, like getting exclusive handsets that people actually want.
The bad of course is that by selling the towers and dumping debt, they could be making themselves attractive to a possible suitor in the near future.
Does this affect them building more towers and if so does that mean no more new towers, TowerCo builds the new towers or towers built automatically belong to TowerCo?
I at one time used to build towers so I have a little knowledge of how this works. My opinion is that Sprint will still build a tower, if it is in a area where there is a coverage issue and there is no nearby towers that will meet height and azimuth requirements. For example, lets say they have issues somewhere and they need to put antenna’s up 175″ at azimuth’s of 70, 140, and 210 degress. Normally they go do a site survey and see what in the area. If lets say American Tower has a tower with vacancy at that height , but there is a brick building at 70 degrees azimuth more than likely that would not work and they would have to build a new site. This is a very simple example though. There is a lot of cost with building a site. real estate,Engineering, materials, planning, permits, greasing the community that doesn’t want it, code compliance, construction, and on going maintenance. Its better to be out of that business all togetther if you can. its a pain
“The bad of course is that by selling the towers and dumping debt, they could be making themselves attractive to a possible suitor in the near future.”
This isn’t “bad” news if you have been scooping up Sprint stocks lately.. esp. if you bought in May when it hit the mid 6’s 🙂
looks like the sprint coalition is attempting to provide damage control as usual. selling off towers is clearly an act of desperation. perhaps theyre doing it to recover the $253 million operating loss during q1. too bad the instinct couldnt prevent this from happening. maybe sprint will require activation of simply everything plan for all their phones! or we can just blame sero users for all of sprints failures.
I disagree wholeheartedly with the previous assertion, The Instinct is still on backorder so that gives the impression of selling well but this deal doesn’t have all the towers involved just 3K
of course you disagree don louie. sprint can do no wrong in your eyes. sprint didnt lose $253 million in the first quarter along with 1.09 million customers right? you can spin this article like every other and we can go back and forth all day but the bottom line is sprint is in trouble and is desperate for money. sell towers today and the company tomorrow.
You got me confused, I call it out when it’s wrong but in this case them selling a few of the many towers for someone else to maintain is not a bad thing. I never said this company is infalable, in fact the data and roaming cap is dumb in addition to having to change plans for the Instinct if current plans cover it and no small minute t/d/m/s plan isn’t bright either. Let’s see how it plays out though, and by the way Sprint does do wrong
all your spinning is making me dizzy. i read some of your posts in the sero thread and got the feeling you were a fanboy. you make it sound like sprint is doing great and sold “just 3k” of their towers despite the fact that sprint lost hundreds of millions of dollars last quarter and their credit rating is junk status. since sprint is already outsourcing customer service, e-care then why not towers right? cmon don louie, we are both sprint customers but stop lying to yourself. sprint is becoming embarrassing.
When I said you had me confused I had it right. No more so called spin, keep your opinion and I’ll keep mine
agreed 🙂