Nextwave To Emerge From Ch. 11 Very Solvent
Nextwave, the wireless carrier that bought spectrum in the 90s, but then promptly went into bankruptcy, has turned another significant corner on its road to offering BWA services to US customers. The bankruptcy court overseeing the Nextwave reorganization approved the companies re-structuring plan – a plan which sees all creditors and investors paid off in full, and the path cleared to launch a BWA network in NYC and Las Vegas. Although many observers still think that Nextwave sold all of its spectrum rights to Verizon Wireless in order to pay off creditors, actually it only sold its 1.9GHz spectrum, leaving it ample 2.5GHz spectrum to offer BWA (a correction we made in November). Nextwave, who we have disparaged because it tied up valuable spectrum for years, is now a company we eagerly watch. Like Clearwire, Towerstream, NextWeb and some others, Nextwave proposes to build a broadband wireless network, but the key difference is that Nextwave is promising that the network will be mobile when launched – not fixed like the pre-WiMAX companies above. Also a differentiator is that Nextwave plans to launch in NYC, not just in secondary markets. The company says it has “invested in certain 4th generation wireless technologies” but we’re not at liberty to say which. Make your own guesses, but remember: it’s a mobile solution, available now, operating at 2.5GHz.
