US Carrier Consolidation Continues

While the nation's big carriers have pretty much done all the consolidating they can, there's still quite a bit of potential for mergers and acquisitions among the US' smaller regional carriers -- the kind of carriers T-Mobile said it was eyeing for potential buyouts. Regional carriers started the consolidating well before the top-level operators, and Alltel has been pretty active, buying Western Wireless earlier this year and quietly becoming the country's fifth-largest mobile operator, now with 15 million customers. It's added another feather to its cap, saying it will buy Minnesota-based Midwest Wireless for just over a billion dollars, adding another 400,000 subscribers. What's interesting is to look at the value of these deals on a per-subscriber basis: Alltel is paying about $2700 per Midwest Wireless subscriber, and paid about $2250 per sub for Western Wireless. Compare that to the roughly $2300 Sprint paid for each Nextel subscriber, but particularly the almost $1900 Cingular paid for AT&T users -- a price widely belived to be above the odds. But the value isn't necessarily all in the customers, the operators' spectrum holdings are getting increasingly valuable as well. Alltel also is considering a plan to spin off its fixed-line holdings, a move that would make it an attractive acquisition target for Verizon or Sprint. Given the prices its paid for subscribers in recent deals, that could represent quite a windfall.