Sprint’s Plan to Mortgage Its Airwaves

As Sprint nears an eighth straight year in the red, the mobile operator is carrying $34 billion in debt—more than twice its market value. Chairman Masayoshi Son, whose uber-carrier SoftBank took control of Sprint in 2013, has a plan to start paying off those debts. It’s a little like borrowing against the tires to make car payments.

According to Sprint Chief Financial Officer Tarek Robbiati, the proposal is to create another subsidiary of Son’s Japanese corporation that will lend Sprint money. The new unit plans to accept the carrier’s wireless equipment and some of its rights to slices of the wireless spectrum as collateral. Sprint says that while it won’t give up control of those precious airwaves—worth more than $115 billion, according to Bloomberg Intelligence—it’s aiming for $3 billion to $5 billion this year from these loans.