Throwing just a little caution to the wind over brewing GPS interference concerns , Cricket — the CDMA budget carrier that makes a speciality of contract-free plans — has attached with LightSquared to deliver additional LTE service through a roaming agreement that’ll supplement its own rollout “over the following few years. ” All told, the moves should bring it as much as technological speed with archrival MetroPCS , which deployed LTE last year (beating Verizon to market, actually) and currently has a pair of Samsung-sourced handsets available on the market to exploit it. For LightSquared’s part, it’s precisely the form of deal they’ve been seeking to ink: the corporate has expressed no real interest in lighting up a retail-facing carrier of its own, instead offering wholesale LTE deals to other carriers — like, say, Cricket — who don’t necessarily have the spectrum, the time, or the budget to roll out 4G in earnest. Follow the break for LightSquared’s press release.
[Thanks, Mark]
SAN DIEGO AND RESTON, Va. – March 22, 2011– Leap Wireless International, Inc. (NASDAQ: LEAP), a number one provider of innovative and price-driven wireless communications services, and LightSquared™, the nation’s first wholesale-only integrated wireless broadband and satellite network company, today announced that they’ve entered right into a long-term 4G roaming agreement. The recent arrangement will allow Cricket, Leap’s operating subsidiary, to supplement the LTE coverage that Cricket plans to deploy across its own networks over the following few years with LTE roaming services from LightSquared.
“Our business progress demonstrates how data services are increasingly important to our customers, as evidenced by our customers’ significant uptake of smartphones and knowledge-focused, higher-ARPU service plans,” said Doug Hutcheson, Leap’s President and CEO. “We intend to deploy our own LTE networks beginning this year to counterpoint the prevailing nationwide 3G services we currently offer to customers. This new roaming arrangement will let us offer customers an excellent-greater 4G service area as LightSquared expands its own network. We believe that the broad coverage due to this business agreement will enhance our ability to present compelling services and products and make allowance us to bolster our retail relationships and distribution capabilities. It’ll also give us flexibility to access additional 4G capacity where needed as data-centric devices become more popular and require increasingly more bandwidth.”
“Leap is a great company and we’re excited to do business with them,” said Sanjiv Ahuja, chairman and CEO of LightSquared. “Cricket customers’ appetite for wireless data is growing exponentially and in ways nobody can have envisioned even many years ago. By providing a wholesale-only nationwide 4G LTE network complemented by satellite coverage, LightSquared might help Leap meet its customers’ demand for universal, affordable broadband connectivity. We’re fully committed to delivering our roaming services on time and with the standard, speed, coverage and capacity required to support Leap’s business needs.”
Financial and other terms of the roaming agreement weren’t disclosed.
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