SureWest Wireless is being bought by Verizon Wireless for $69 million in cash. SureWest Wireless holds spectrum licences covering 3.8 million people in the Sacramento area and had around 50,000 subscribers at the end of September 2007.
SureWest, which operates triple play services in Roseville, Calif. and Kansas City, seems to have decided that mass market wireless is a scale business inefficiently operated by a purely local operator. Also, now that SureWest operates in more than one geography, it is unable to offer the same set of services in Kansas City that it now offers in Roseville, complicating the firm's marketing efforts.
Necessity often is the mother of invention, and SureWest seems now to be betting its future on broadband services, not wireless and broadband. In similar fashion, Qwest has decided to take a similar posture, having outsourced its wireless offerings to Sprint and its video entertainment to DirecTV.
It's worth keeping in mind: business strategies appropriate for scale players do not often make as much sense--if sense at all--for niche players. It is less a matter of what one would like to do and more a matter of what one practically can do.
Monday, January 28, 2008
SureWest Sells Wireless Assets
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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