Verizon Buys Alltel to Become the #1 US Wireless Carrier

June 5th, 2008

Huge story today. Verizon announced their plan to buy Alltel for about $28 billion! With the new 80 million subscribers that they would acquire from Alltel, Verizon is now officially the mobile largest carrier in the US.

This just makes sense. A bigger CDMA and BREW network buying out a smaller CDMA and BREW network. Apparently this isn’t the first time they tried to buy Alltel:

Verizon Wireless, which is a joint venture of Verizon and Vodafone, has tried to merge with Alltel before, in 2007, but that transaction did not go through. Since that time, though, Alltel changed ownership; it’s now owned by private equity, rather than being a publicly traded company.

Of course, everything is assuming that the Feds will approve the merger.   There could be some changes coming up ahead though.  You can read everything here.

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