MetroPCS’s CFO has said the company is interested in buying lower 700MHz A block spectrum that Verizon plans to sell and that it has a “substantial war chest to go out and specifically acquire additional spectrum”.
CFO Braxton Carter’s…
MetroPCS’s CFO has said the company is interested in buying lower 700MHz A block spectrum that Verizon plans to sell and that it has a “substantial war chest to go out and specifically acquire additional spectrum”.
CFO Braxton Carter’s comments, at a TMT conference in Boston, follow a statement published earlier in the week on MetroPCS’s website by CEO Roger D. Lindquist.
Lindquist welcomed the FCC’s scrutiny of Verizon’s planned spectrum divestment, saying: “Any efforts to get unused spectrum into the hands of those who would put it to immediate use will enhance competition and innovation and help ease the current spectrum crunch.”
Carter said at the conference that MetroPCS might be interested in buying A Block spectrum from Verizon but that it wasn’t “problem free”.
He described it as a “great option”, providing the FCC clears up the interference that A block spectrum experiences with channel 51. Before bands of 700MHz were sold to telcos the whole spectrum was used for broadcast and some of it still is, which has caused interference issues for wireless operators.
An FCC filing dated 17 May reveals that MetroPCS held discussions with the regulator to assess solutions that will limit interference.
Carter explained that spectrum was the future for MetroPCS, but that it was not in a rush to acquire more.
“It’s not like we have a gun to our head and need to do something tomorrow,” he said.
“What it’s really doing to us is elevating our capex levels, so we’re essentially spending a lot of our cashflow to reinvest in the network to densify, with the [current] lack of spectrum. Once we receive that spectrum we can back off on the capex substantially and go back to more of a free cashflow generation, which is definitely our long term plan,” he said.
