[Stu]

Mostly they are purchased like land to resell. Sometimes the theory is to make money from roaming revenues. Occasionally it is a small town that just wants service and the big guys didn't think it was worth it.

Remember that the US started with a bunch of these companies and they were bought out. We did not do like most of the EU and grant licenses nationally. The theory at the outset was that the smaller licenses holders would have a greater incentive to cover their little plot of coverage area. Until roughly 2000, most Americans had plans like the folks in Canada, Mexico, and India do where we roamed if we got 80k from our homes.

Notice that Verizon Wireless holds a number of GSM licenses in the US even though they use the competing CDMA technology. In small towns where they have licenses, they will often through up "roamer nets" which are GSM networks solely designed to get roaming revenues from GSM visitors who travel through or visit these towns.

The United States is geographically as large as the EU but when you get away from the coasts, we have a large areas of land with very light population density. There is an opportunity for investors to develop this areas for roaming revenues and eventually to sell to the big guys. Additionally, several years ago our Justice Department granted an antitrust waiver to the major U.S. carriers to develop roaming collectives for desolate parts of our country. ATT, Sprint, Verizon, and TMobile can agree to jointly cover a desolate stretch of a North Dakota freeway and each invest in the collective. Lastly, a small amount of the US carriers are actually Indian Tribal Governments who function as semi-autonomous/self-governing regions in the US. In addition to raising revenues from roamers, they may have an aspect demonstrating self-autonomy over practicality.

I was looking at the Canadian list of small providers last night and there were a lot of tiny Canadian ones I never heard of. The idea of buying one of these to take advantage of Government mandated lower roaming rates is interesting. E.g. China Mobile buying the Artic GSM cooperative outside of Anchorage and letting China Mobile subscribers get FCC mandated domestic discounted roaming rates.