United States carriers are investing huge sums to acquire more wireless spectrum, especially with 5G on the horizon. T-Mobile recently won a bidding war for a large chunk of the 600Mhz spectrum, and AT&T was preparing to buy Straight Path Commutations last month. However, it turns out that Verizon will be buying Straight Path instead, after winning a bidding war against AT&T.
Straight Path Communications is a spectrum asset company, who owns licences for some of the 39GHz and 28GHz bands. The purchase totaled to $184 per share, or $3.1 billion altogether, and is expected to finalize within nine months (pending FCC approval). Straight Path announced on Monday that an unnamed company offered to buy it, which was only revealed today to be Verizon.
Verizon will also pay a termination fee of $38 million to AT&T, on behalf of Straight Path, due to the latter company terminating the previous deal. And you thought phone contract termination fees were expensive.