GigaOM

Remember the geek in Verizon Wireless commercials, repeating - can you hear me now? ad nauseam. Well, its not fancy selling. Verizon Wireless takes its voice quality claims seriously and has been spending tons of money trying to fill out any holes in its network. On January 26, the company bought Cellular 2000, a miniscule carrier with 42,000 customers because it had spectrum that could add more heft to Verizon’s business in Minneapolis. Then the company went ahead and bid aggressively in the ongoing spectrum auction. Today VZ says it is spending about $69 million to buy spectrum in North Carolina. I guess it is all to make the VZ geek some time-off. I mean he has been working really hard! In reality its about making sure that VZ has enough spectrum to offer those higher-priced 3G services and yet at the same time cram more defectors to its network without quality problems.