NextWave Wireless (News - Alert), a provider of mobile multimedia and wireless broadband technologies, has solicited the assistance of Deutsche Bank and UBS Investment Bank to explore the sale of its extensive spectrum holdings in the United States.

 

The company’s U.S. spectrum footprint serves more than 251 million people. It owns licenses 154 licenses in the 1.7/2.1 GHz band, 30 licenses in the 2.3 GHz band, and 39 licenses and spectrum leases in the 2.5 GHz band.

 

“Since the completion of the recent 700 MHz auction, we have received multiple offers for our U.S. spectrum assets,” said Allen Salmasi, chief executive officer and president of NextWave Wireless, in a statement. “Given our continued success in developing highly differentiated wireless broadband and multimedia-enabled products, we no longer view our spectrum holdings as critical to reaching our product sales objectives, and believe that now is the perfect time for us to sell these valuable assets while network operators are trying to finalize their band plans and spectrum holdings for their continuing 3G and planned 4G rollouts.”

 

Salmasi continued: “Monetizing the value of our substantial spectrum assets would allow us to further strengthen our balance sheet, retire debt, and continue the commercial introduction of a wide range of innovative wireless broadband and multimedia solutions such as our high-performance WiMAX and RFIC chipsets, advanced multi-mode, multi-band TD-CDMA, WiMAX (News - Alert) and LTE enabled base station platforms, breakthrough MXtv and TDtv mobile television systems, highly advanced mobile multimedia software solutions and platforms that we are now bringing into commercial deployments globally with many of the largest mobile operators and device manufactures in the world.”

 

“NextWave’s spectrum holdings are highly suitable for mobile operators who need to enhance the coverage, capacity, and performance of their existing 3G and future 4G wireless networks,” said Edward Dunn, a Managing Director with the Media & Telecom Group at Deutsche Bank, in a statement.

 

“We view NextWave’s AWS spectrum as highly complementary to other AWS spectrum holders, especially mobile operators who are now in the process of deploying networks in this band. In addition, since many WiMAX and LTE (News - Alert) networks are planned to be deployed in the 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz – 2.7 GHz bands globally, we believe that the company’s New York EBS/BRS spectrum represents one of the more valuable markets in the 2.5 GHz band while their extensive WCS footprint should attract interest from both national and regional mobile operators.”

 

“We look forward to working with NextWave to maximize the value of their U.S. spectrum assets. The recently concluded 700 MHz band auction once again demonstrated that licensed spectrum remains a highly valuable asset in the United States,” said Davis Terry, Co-Chairman of Global Telecom at UBS Securities.

Anil Sharma is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.