T-Mobile USA Comes to Bentonville
by February 16, 2004 12:00 am 68 views
The Bellview, Wash., mobile phone company recently bought six building permits to co-locate on existing towers in Bentonville and plans to build two new towers of its own. The company is also building 31 additional tower sites in the Little Rock area.
The cost to co-locate runs around $100,000, and the cost to build a new tower is around $250,000. Steve Thornhill, T-Mobile’s regional engineer in Oklahoma City, said the decision was made largely due to demand from existing customers that service Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville.
Thornhill said the tower construction marks T-Mobile’s first real foray into the Arkansas market. “We have to start somewhere,” he said.
Six of the firm’s eight Northwest Arkansas towers are operational right now and two more should be working within the next few weeks.
T-Mobile USA is owned by publicly traded Deutsche Telekom of Germany.