Citing offers from several potential buyers, NextWave Wireless has retained Deutsche Bank and UBS Investment Bank to explore the sale of its extensive spectrum holdings in the United States.
NextWave’s U.S. spectrum footprint covers over 251 million people, or pops, in the United States and includes major markets such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Houston, and Detroit. The company’s holdings include licenses and lease rights for a total of 4.7 billion MHz/pops of spectrum comprised of 154 Advanced Wireless Service (“AWS”) licenses in the 1.7/2.1 GHz band, 30 Wireless Communication Service (“WCS”) licenses in the 2.3 GHz band, and 39 Educational Broadband Service (“EBS”) and Broadband Radio Service (“BRS”) 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. 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,” said Allen Salmasi, chief executive officer and president of NextWave Wireless. “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 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.”http://www.nextwave.comEarlier this month, NextWave Wireless announced its NW2000 Wave 2-ready family of second-generation mobile WiMAX chipsets designed for high-volume, small form-factor wireless broadband subscriber stations, including CPE modems, PC card modems, laptops, multimode/smartphone handsets and mobile multimedia terminals. Specifically, the new mobile WiMAX chipsets include:
- NW2100: NextWave’s NW2100 is a family of 802.16e-based mobile subscriber baseband System-On-a-Chip (SoC) solutions designed for Wave 2 WiMAX Forum compliance. Integrating an ARM9 processor and memory, the NW2100 provides a complete self-hosted modem, enabling designs with minimum processing load on the host processor. The chip uses 65-nanometer CMOS process and includes integrated 802.11b/g MAC/BB, SIM controller, multiple host interfaces, an embedded device security/firmware authentication engine, support for optimum data throughput, and advanced proprietary techniques that significantly reduce the overall system power consumption.
- NW2200: Designed to be used in conjunction with NextWave’s NW2100 WiMAX SoC family, NextWave’s NW2200 family of single-chip, highly integrated, multi-band Radio Frequency (RF) transceivers have dual independent receive chains optimized for mobile applications. The NW2200 provides a compact, ultra low-power, high-performance solution for manufacturers of wireless broadband mobile devices, and unlike competitor RF ICs it supports all major worldwide WiMAX bands and profiles. To further decrease total system cost and chip footprint, NextWave has deployed a direct-conversion architecture, integrated low-noise amplifiers, and integrated low-dropout voltage regulators for reduced external component count.