In a series of chats with the Wall Street Journal, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam says the company will be sharing spectrum with rural providers. According to McAdam, Verizon doesn’t expect to make a “lot of money” from these deals, but it will help Verizon generate added income from rural carriers, and expand their national LTE reach. Of course Verizon’s LTE network will only be in (tops) 30 markets by year end. Says the Journal:

As we’ve long explored, it’s important to remember that Verizon is busily selling off DSL and landline customers in rural markets. These deals already give Verizon the ability to ditch union workers and regulators (who have been complaining about Verizon’s neglect of rural markets) as well as offload debt and get huge tax breaks.

But Verizon can return to these markets and win back many of these customers (Frontier, Fairpoint) with LTE service. Because of the nature of these deals, Verizon’s partner companies wind up overloaded with debt. As a result, most of these customers will probably still be on last generation DSL by the time Verizon finally reaches them with 5-12 Mbps LTE.

Related posts:

1. Verizon’s Rural LTE Ambitions Remain Murky – ‘Unlikely that we would be licensing our spectrum over to someone else.’
2. Frontier gets West Virginia approval for Verizon rural line purchase
3. Verizon & Google Developing iPad Rival – Running on LTE network with ‘bucket of megabyte’ data plan
4. Verizon sets date to hand over rural wireline keys to Frontier
5. Verizon answers Europe financial markets’ low latency call

Tags: CEO Lowell McAdam, Fairpoint, Journal, lowell mcadam, LTE, network, term evolution, Verizon, verizon wireless, Wall Street, wall street journal, Wireless

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