Here is a Good One for you! Chasetel has ownership of a BTA in Middelsboro, KY. The transfer of that BTA is part of a complicated transaction between NTCH and LWIN. NTCH is the company that we involved in a JV with up in Idaho. Anyway, I was looking through Buildout notifications and found this.
"The Middlesboro BTA presented unique challenges to Chasetel and NTCH in the development and implementation of a service plan that would satisfy the construction requirements on an economically rational basis. The Middlesboro MTA is located near the Cumberland Gap in the lower Appalachian mountains, at the junction of Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee, one of the most undeveloped regions in the continental United States. There is virtually no industry in the BTA and the commercial activity tends to be on a very small scale.
The BTA is by far the smallest and most rural of the three BTAs which make up the Knoxville MTA – according to the 1990 Census, the entire BTA has a total population of only 121,217. This rural population is spread out in remote hollows and valleys with no significant cities or population clusters, and has an average population density of only 75 people per square mile. In fact, none of the four counties that comprise the BTA have a population of more than 37,000. The small and diffuse population in this very rural BTA makes it very difficult to efficiently provide significant numbers of consumers with adequate PCS service. Moreover, the impediments to radio frequency propagation presented by the mountainous terrain of the BTA makes offering adequate service even more difficult. The number of cell sites needed to serve
one quarter of the population in the BTA could not possibly have justified the expense in terms
of the economic return. Chasetel and NTCH therefore examined the market for special niches which needed and could support a new PCS service, and found such a market in Lincoln Memorial University (“LMU”) and the surrounding community. LMU is the largest educational institution in the BTA. It has a student body of
approximately 1700 students and a staff of 200. Located in Harrogate, Tennessee, LMU is not
only a major regional educational institution in the Tri-State area, but one of the largest.. The telephone service previously available to students was inadequate. In order to provide LMU and its community with more and better wireless options, Chasetel and NTCH developed a specialized service offering named “CollegeTown PCS.” CollegeTown PCS is designed to address the particular needs of students and the associated educational community in niche markets like LMU. “College towns” have unique communications requirements in terms of price, coverage, and intermobile connectivity, that the CollegeTown PCS service can address very effectively and at a price that is affordable to LMU students and the surrounding population. CollegeTown PCS gives students – who would otherwise rely on dormitory payphones or shared phones in the university network – economical access to personalized wireless phone service. With CollegeTown PCS students, faculty and staff can communicate with each other in real time
on their PCS mobiles with no intermobile per minute charges for about $19.95 per month. The
CollegeTown PCS service offered at LMU also recognizes that many of the students at the
University have family and friends in the Knoxville area and therefore treats calls to Knoxville as free local calls.
At present there is no other PCS service provider in the area, and the cellular coverage is spotty at best with insufficient signal strength for in-building service. The
CollegeTown PCS service therefore presents a very attractive and economical alternative to cellular for the LMU community. A map highlighting the service area for the university and the surrounding area is attached as Exhibit B.
collegetownpcs.com
PCSTEL |
