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Sprint announced yesterday that it had completed the sale of about 3,080 towers to TowerCo for $670 million. Sprint will lease the towers back from the company it sold them to, freeing up cash to pay down its debt in the process.
The two companies involved have signed a long-term leasing agreement whereby TowerCo will provide Sprint with towers to support its CDMA, iDEN and WiMAX networks.
Sprint will use the money raised from the sale to pay down some of its $24 billion in debt. In recent years Sprint has fallen far behind rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless in subscriber growth and profitability.
However, Sprint is by no means the first carrier to move away from owning their own towers. Instead, companies like American Tower, Crown Castle International and smaller players like TowerCo, have taken over ownership of towers and then leased them back to the carriers who sold them.
September 28th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
This sounds like a good business move. However, I don’t seem to get good cell phone coverage where I live no matter what! Very frustrating!
September 29th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Well my friend has Sprint and if selling their towers will help with their coverage then they did a good thing. I hope it not only improves their signals but also some others too. Don’t mean to be sounding like I’m picking on Sprint!!
KeeKee
September 30th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I’m surprised they didn’t do this sooner. It makes a lot of sense.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I work for Verizon and I’m not sure if they have done anything similar to this or not. I’ll have to do some checking when I go back into work tomorrow. Sure makes since to me, especially with the way things are getting so tight, ya know?
October 1st, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Its about time they sold all of their towers; I would have done this a long time ago. I look forward to trying Sprint’s new phone.
October 6th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
I didn’t think any one company still owned towers. I thought they were all sort of a joint venture. So much for what I know, huh?