Verizon In Talks To Buy Alltel – $27 billion dollar deal looms…

In: broadbandreports.com|Site Feeds|VoIP

4 Jun 2008

CNBC reports that Verizon is in deep negotiations to acquire Alltel for around $27 billion, which I’m fairly sure Verizon has in their petty cash drawer. According to CNBC, Verizon has been eyeing the acquisition for a while, but thought Alltel’s valuation was too high when two private investment firms nabbed the company last year. With a 10% growth in Alltel’s Ebitda, Verizon has changed their mind about the nation’s fifth largest wireless carrier.

I guess that’s one way to stop Alltel from running those commercials that annoyed Verizon so much. Alltel is planning on upgrading to LTE (theoretically capable of speeds up to 100Mbps with latency as low as 20ms) and, like Verizon, the switch will mean a migration from CDMA to GSM.

What do you think, Alltel users? Ready to jump to “big red”? Does anyone think the deal will face trouble with regulators? I’ll note that one analyst for the Yankee Group thinks a T-Mobile and Sprint deal is on the horizon as well:

When Dan Hesse clears the decks on WiMAX, on Clearwire, when he fixes his customer care problem, when he proves to the market that he can transition push-to-talk to Q-chat if he solves all of those problems by the end of this year, he either becomes an attractive candidate to be acquired by T-Mobile or Deutsche Telecom or vice versa. Neither T-Mobile nor Sprint on its own is sufficient to compete against Verizon.

Note he stated this before this Alltel news broke. Consolidation and mergers, ahoy.
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