Latest news with #spectrum
Phone Arena
a day ago
- Business
- Phone Arena
UScellular gets a new name once the T-Mobile deal closes August 1st
This Friday, August 1st, the transaction between T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular will close. T-Mobile is paying $2.4 billion in cash and will assume $2 billion of UScellular debt. In return, 4 million UScellular customers will move to Team Magenta, and T-Mobile will also take possession of UScellular's retail stores and 30% of its spectrum in the 600 MHz, 700 MHz A Block, PCS, AWS, 2.5 GHz, and 24 GHz (mmWave) frequencies. Thanks to the additional spectrum being received, the transaction will improve T-Mobile 's network, especially in rural America. But what will happen to UScellular, once the fifth-largest wireless carrier in the country? First of all, UScellular will be getting a new name and some new executives. As soon as the deal closes this coming Friday, Douglas W. Chambers will become the interim President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the post-closing business, which will be named Array Digital Infrastructure, Inc. The company's business will focus on a portfolio of 4,400 towers owned by Array, along with its holdings of the remaining spectrum after T-Mobile takes over the agreed-upon airwaves. Chambers, currently UScellular's Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, will oversee the operations and strategic initiatives related to the towers and the airwaves belonging to Array. Chambers says, "I am honored to assume the role of interim CEO of Array at this pivotal time for the company, We have a great opportunity ahead of us and I look forward to working with the Board and our management team to continue to strengthen our tower business, seek opportunities to monetize our retained spectrum, and work towards closing the announced spectrum transactions." As part of the shakeup, UScellular will be changing its New York Stock Exchange symbol from USM to AD. The USM symbol had been used by UScellular since it went public back in 1988. To go along with the name change, the company will introduce a new website and a new logo. The firm will remain headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. -LeRoy T. Carlson, Jr., Chairman of the Board, UScellular Following the closing of the deal on Friday, the board of directors of Array is expected to approve a special dividend of $22.50 - $23.75 per Common Share and Series A Common Share. When you switch to Total Wireless, keep your number & grab 3 mo. of 5G We may earn a commission if you make a purchase Check Out The Offer
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
EchoStar Corporation (SATS): A Bull Case Theory
We came across a bullish thesis on EchoStar Corporation on by OGBigJim. In this article, we will summarize the bulls' thesis on SATS. EchoStar Corporation's share was trading at $28.61 as of July 18th. SATS's forward P/E was 69.93 according to Yahoo Finance. A 5G antenna farm connected to a network of wireless operators and strategic partners, signifying a global reach. Echostar faces a pivotal moment as the FCC, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, reviews extensions granted to the company for building out its spectrum licenses and examines claims of underutilization, with a decision due June 6, 2025. The review, prompted by opposition from SpaceX and other petitioners, questions the validity of prior deadline extensions and raises the possibility of spectrum sharing, which could sharply erode asset value. Echostar asserts it has met all build-out milestones, covering 80% of the population by end-2024, and argues that most unbuilt licenses are rural and less valuable, preserving over 80% of spectrum worth. The company is also disputing SpaceX's claims, citing prior FCC rulings that determined dual use would cause harmful interference. If the FCC reverses prior decisions, Echostar could face enforcement actions, accelerated capex, and potential asset forfeiture, increasing the likelihood of Chapter 11 or forced divestitures. Chairman Charlie Ergen, with 52% equity ownership, would likely oversee any restructuring as debtor-in-possession, maximizing asset value through bankruptcy or orderly sales. Valuation scenarios for spectrum assets range from $39 per share at book value to $120 in a full breakup, with management estimating $30 billion of unrealized fair market value. Recent missed interest payments on bonds, made to conserve liquidity during the review, have heightened bankruptcy fears but left secured and DBS debt largely stable. With the FCC review accelerating the timeline for asset monetization, the base case points to regulatory headwinds and restructuring, while a favorable ruling could unlock significant upside for shareholders. Previously we covered a on Iridium Communications Inc. (IRDM) by Stock Picker's Corner in October 2024, which highlighted its resilient L-band network, diverse clientele, and growth prospects driven by rising geopolitical and AI-powered connectivity demand. The stock has appreciated about 8.2% since our coverage as the thesis played out. OGBigJim shares a similar industry view but emphasizes regulatory and spectrum monetization at EchoStar Corporation. EchoStar Corporation is not on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 50 hedge fund portfolios held SATS at the end of the first quarter which was 46 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of SATS as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 8 Best Wide Moat Stocks to Buy Now and 30 Most Important AI Stocks According to BlackRock. Disclosure: None.
Bloomberg
6 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Senate Confirms Official to Lead $42.5 Billion Broadband Program
The US Senate confirmed Arielle Roth to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department branch responsible for administering broadband funding and managing federal spectrum use. The vote on Wednesday was 52-42. Roth comes to the post from the office of Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican head of the Senate Commerce Committee, where she worked as his telecom policy director.
CNET
17-07-2025
- Business
- CNET
Wi-Fi Experts Reveal How Trump's Budget Bill Could Slow Down Your Wi-Fi
You won't find the term 'Wi-Fi' anywhere in the text of President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, but a provision authorizing the FCC to auction off spectrum could seriously impact speeds on newer Wi-Fi routers. Every wireless device, from garage door openers to baby monitors, relies on the electromagnetic spectrum to work. But that spectrum is a limited resource -- to open up capacity for one technology, you have to take it away from another. The latest generation of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers made massive speed improvements when the FCC opened up the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi use in 2020. Now, the FCC could auction off up to half of that same band to wireless companies, essentially trading Wi-Fi speeds for mobile. Americans spend between 77% and 88% of their screen-on time connected to Wi-Fi, according to the mobile analytics company Opensignal. That's also where the bulk of data-hungry tasks like uploading, downloading and online gaming occur. For every one bit carried on a mobile network, nearly 9 bits are carried on Wi-Fi. It's clear that we use Wi-Fi for the vast majority of our heavy lifting on the internet. So why does Trump's Big Beautiful Bill trade Wi-Fi speeds for mobile? Put simply, the government wants the money. Locating local internet providers 'Because spectrum auctions allow the government to get revenue without raising taxes, spectrum auctions frequently show up in budget bills,' writes Harold Feld, an analyst with the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. 'In effect, this amounts to treating spectrum as a piggy bank rather than a vital national resource, which makes for lousy spectrum policy.' The last spectrum auction generated $22 billion in revenue for the federal government in 2021-2022. This one is expected to raise $85 billion by 2034, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. This isn't the first time the mobile industry has attempted to commandeer that valuable spectrum. When the FCC first opened up 6GHz in 2020, then-FCC Chair Ajit Pai -- who was appointed by Trump -- wrote that keeping the band open to Wi-Fi 'promotes more efficient and productive use of the spectrum' than using it for cellular networks. In addition to the 6GHz band, the bill also lets the FCC auction off spectrum from Citizens Broadband Radio Service, a 150MHz slice between 3.55 and 3.7GHz that's primarily used by fixed wireless internet providers in rural areas. How will your Wi-Fi be affected? The wireless industry is poised to take control of about half the 6GHz band, the valuable piece of electromagnetic spectrum that makes Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers so much faster than their predecessors. A laptop equipped with Wi-Fi 7 could reach "potential maximum" speeds of 5.8Gbps -- 2.4 times faster than the 2.4Gbps possible with Wi-Fi 6/6E, according to Intel, one of the companies producing Wi-Fi 7-certified chipsets. The median internet speed in the US currently sits around 288Mbps, which is roughly 20 times slower than 5.8Gbps. But like data consumption, the appetite for faster internet speed grows every year: Nielsen's law of internet bandwidth finds that a high-end internet user's connection speed grows by roughly 50% each year, doubling every 21 months -- an observation that has held true since 1983. As more and more people opt for gigabit internet speeds, the 6GHz band becomes even more essential. Wi-Fi 7 routers doubled the channel size of the 6GHz band, going from 160MHz to 320MHz. It's like a highway going from two to four lanes -- traffic can flow more easily without hitting jams. A slew of new devices are equipped to take advantage of 6GHz, including the latest iPhones, Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones, MacBooks, iPads, PlayStation 5 Pro, and Xbox Series X and S gaming consoles. The other bands used by Wi-Fi routers, 2.4 and 5GHz, are so well-entrenched at this point in every house in America that it would be impossible to budge them out. But because 6GHz is relatively new, there aren't as many devices operating on that band. But 6GHz may be getting crowded with Wi-Fi devices sooner than we think. CableLabs, a nonprofit funded by cable industry companies, ran a simulation based on five years of growing Wi-Fi demand for 6GHz in a 144-unit building. It found that 6GHz will quickly approach exhaustion in high-density environments like this. '6GHz seems like a lot of spectrum, but when you look at it in a scenario where there's 144 Wi-Fi networks in a building with all these devices, it doesn't quite go as far as you think,' Mark Walker, VP of technology policy at CableLabs, told CNET. Hitting that limit on the 6GHz band would mean different things for different applications, and it's most likely to happen during the 'internet rush hour,' or between 7 and 11 p.m.. 'That's when you start to see latency and packet loss creep up,' Walker said. 'For something like email, that's not super critical. If your email comes 2 seconds later, you don't even know. But if my voice comes 5 seconds later on a video call, the call is effectively over.' Why the mobile industry wants 6GHz Mobile carriers are always extremely thirsty for more spectrum, but it's unclear how much they really need 6GHz. 'There is no pressing need that I feel like we have to go out and acquire spectrum in the next 12, 24, even 36 months,' AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said at a conference just last month. Similarly, Verizon Executive VP Sowmyanarayan Sampath said, 'We have almost unlimited spectrum' in May 2024. T-Mobile also said last year that it's only used about 60% of the spectrum it already has. That said, a J.D. Power survey from January found that demand for data is increasing among wireless customers, and with it, network problems -- something that the 6GHz band would certainly help with. Desroches also noted that new spectrum could be used to boost AT&T's wireless home internet service, AT&T Internet Air. (I got paltry average download speeds of 5.86Mbps when I tested the service last year.) AT&T cheered the spectrum news in the budget bill, writing in a statement that it will help the company 'meet soaring consumer demand and keep the US technologically competitive with other countries.' Fixed wireless providers could also be affected I've focused mostly on the impact on Wi-Fi speeds, but fixed wireless internet providers in rural areas are also at risk of losing CBRS spectrum. It's not just internet providers, either -- more than 1,000 organizations use these airwaves, including hospitals, airports, sporting venues and universities, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. With less space available in these frequencies, service could be severely diminished. The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which represents small fixed wireless ISPs, sent a letter to the FCC on Tuesday asking it to reconsider auctioning off CBRS spectrum. 'WISPA's members rely on the band to provide essential and reliable broadband services to hundreds of thousands of end users, many of whom live and work in rural communities, or other sparsely populated areas, where competitive choice is lacking,' the letter says. There are a lot of ways the FCC can go with this spectrum auction, and there will certainly be plenty of lobbying by wireless carriers, Wi-Fi advocates and rural internet providers before the dust settles. But we all use these airwaves every day, and the FCC's decisions will impact us one way or another.
Phone Arena
11-07-2025
- Business
- Phone Arena
T-Mobile's acquisition of UScellular assets is now one step closer to taking place
It's one down, one to go for T-Mobile 's acquisition of UScellular assets. Requiring approval from both the FCC and the Justice Department, today the latter has given the deal its blessing. The DOJ said that it will not seek an injunction to block the transaction. Back in May 2024, T-Mobile agreed to pay $2.4 billion in cash and assume $2 billion of UScellular debt to acquire wireless customers, retail stores, and 30% of the spectrum assets owned by the nation's fifth-largest wireless carrier. That spectrum includes airwaves in the 600 MHz, 700 MHz A Block, PCS, AWS, 2.5 GHz, and 24 GHz (mmWave) frequencies. T-Mobile is a step closer to acquiring UScellular assets after obtaining DOJ approval for the deal. | Image credit-UScellular That haul includes key frequencies used by T-Mobile, such as the 2.5 GHz mid-band airwaves employed for its Ultra Capacity 5G service, the 600 MHz low-band spectrum used for the carrier's Extended Range 5G service, and the 24 GHz high-band spectrum used for its rarely found mmWave service. Heck, T-Mobile might have entered into this deal specifically to pick up these airwaves. Remember, the carrier paid $26 billion to buy Sprint just for its rival's hoard of 2.5GHz mid-band spectrum, which has helped T-Mobile become the 5G leader in the U.S. Even though the DOJ is letting the transaction go through, it did express some concern about competition in wireless and whether there is enough spectrum available to generate competition. The Justice Department also said in its press release that during the investigation, it considered what U.S. wireless customers would have to deal with if UScellular left the market, what benefits consumers might get from allowing the deal to close, and what the result might be from further consolidation in spectrum holdings. The DOJ also investigated what might happen to UScellular subscribers if the carrier survived as an ongoing firm. The Justice Department determined that, should the DOJ block the deal, UScellular "could not keep up with the escalating cost of capital investments in technology required to compete vigorously in the relevant market. This would, in turn, lead to the slow degradation of its network quality." The DOJ compared this outcome with comments made by T-Mobile , saying that it will combine the two networks so that UScellular customers will experience faster data speeds after the transaction closes. At the same time, T-Mobile customers will get better service in rural markets. It's a win-win for all. -U.S. Department of Justice The DOJ also noted that this is "a pivotal moment for the wireless industry." After years of consolidation in the wireless industry thanks to acquisitions, the Big 3 account for more than 90 percent of the roughly 335 million mobile subscriptions in the U.S. Whether this is a positive or negative statistic won't be known until sometime in the future. In 2019, when T-Mobile acquired Sprint, the DOJ feared that the merger would allow the remaining big three (AT&T, T-Mobile , and Verizon) to harm consumers through coordination, leading to "higher prices, reduced innovation, reduced quality, and fewer choices." The T-Mobile -Sprint deal also resulted in less competition to sell wireless service wholesale to MVNOs. T-Mobile and Sprint had been battling for this business. With the acquisition, that competition was gone. The Big 3 also controls 80% of the mobile wireless spectrum used in the U.S. The DOJ writes, "It is of concern to the United States that continued spectrum aggregation by the Big 3 threatens to impede the path for a fourth national player to emerge and challenge the entrenched incumbents with new and innovative offerings. Where future spectrum consolidation transactions threaten this path, the Antitrust Division stands ready to investigate and, if warranted by the facts and evidence, use its enforcement power to protect competition and American consumers." With this lukewarm approval, all that is needed is for the FCC to approve the deal, and the transaction will be ready to close. Secure your connection now at a bargain price! We may earn a commission if you make a purchase Check Out The Offer
