Lately, Telecom companies have been scrambling to snatch up as much spectrum as possible. After all, in the wireless world the more coverage you can provide, the more money you’ll make. At this point, there is only a limited amount of spectrum floating around which means everyone is fighting over what’s available. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s an all-out war, but Telecom companies will certainly spare no expense for a little more.
According to Clearwire, or at least it was noted as such in a security filing on Friday, they received an offer from an unnamed company, to lease its spectrum. The report does not disclose the concerned party, but The Wall Street Journal seems to think the proposal is from Verizon. According to WSJ, Verizon offered $1.5 billion to use Clearwire’s spectrum.
Obviously Verizon is looking to improve their 4G LTE network, and the Clearwire spectrum would be perfect for that.
If Verizon is indeed looking to purchase Clearwire’s spectrum, they might run into some issues. Sprint actually has a stake in what Clearwire does. Better yet, Sprint proposed a total acquisition of Clearwire for 2.1 billion. If Sprint takes over Clearwire completely, we can’t say how that will affect Verizon because it’s a murky thing to speculate about.
Interestingly enough, we also just found out that Sprint is in the middle of a deal with SoftBank and Dish Network. Dish and SoftBank are actually looking to scoop up Sprint, for quite a large sum of money. If you’d like to know a little more about that deal, then by all means, check out our previous coverage.
Clearwire, Sprint and Verizon should all be sitting down soon to discuss the proposal in full. It’s hard to gauge whether or not Sprint will be okay with such dealings. Verizon is, after all, a fairly large competitor of theirs. Adding the Clearwire spectrum to their portfolio would certainly be a tremendous advantage for Verizon.
What do you think folks? Feel free to share your thoughts on any of these dealings, because it’s always good to hear what the community has to say. Hell, I’ll listen to what you have to say over a market analyst, any day.