Earlier in the week, Verizon (NYSE:VZ) announced the sale of its Canadian telephone directory unit (SuperPages Canada) to Bain Capital LLC for a price tag of $1.54 billion.  SuperPages Canada had revenues of $293 million in 2003 and publishes 118 books, in addition to business directories competing directly with Yellow Pages in major cities of Ontario and, since last year, in Quebec.  Verizon was able to realize a nice profit on the transaction, since it originally bought SuperPages from Telus Corp. (NYSE:TU), Canada's No. 2 phone company, for $527 million in 2001. 

A Globe and Mail article indicated that the auction was hotly contested, with Bain outbidding rival phone book publisher Yellow Pages Income Fund of Montreal.  The final price tag was roughly 10 times earnings, which is a premium to the 8.5 times EBITDA paid on 5 sales of directory businesses in North America over the past 3 years. The Globe expects Bain to eventually sell a portion of SuperPages as an income trust.

But more interesting is to consider how Verizon will allocate the proceeds from the sale.  Some company insiders believe that at least a portion of the funds will be used to help finance Verizon's FTTP/triple play strategy.  Verizon is facing triple play competition from MSOs in addition to CLECs, which are expected to take advantage of regulatory arbitrage via UNE-P thereby tapping into Verizon's bank of local access lines.  Therefore, these sources maintain that Verizon is building up cash reserves to help finance initiatives in key future areas such as wireless, VoIP and FTTP.  The May 2004 sale of local phone, phone book, and other operations in Hawaii to Carlyle for $1.65 billion is another example of how Verizon's management is focused in shifting the company's resources to the above three areas. There are also rumors that Verizon is looking for buyers for about 2 million rural phone lines in New York State.

Nancy Gohring had a noteworthy post on her Wi-Fi Networking News blog.  The article talks about a study conducted by the University of Georgia Mobile Media Consortium, which examined large WLAN deployments in the US.  I would suggest downloading the PDF, as the report's findings are quite interesting.

The study is careful to distinguish between a WiFi zone (a group of cooperating hotspots sharing a single management system) and a WiFi cloud (offering continuous coverage over a significant portion of a city's or town's geographic area, utilizing multiple hotspots).  Unlike a zone, a cloud offers contiguous and unified coverage.  A total of 38 clouds and 16 spots were examined.  The study looked at who was deploying the clouds and zones (city, company, economic development group / non-profit organization, property owner, tenant, university) and what was the purpose behind these initiatives (broadband service, economic growth, general promotion, safety, experiment, cost savings, bridge digital, education).

The research suggests that major purpose for clouds is to provide broadband capabilities to a community, whereas for zones, the raison d'etre is to stimulate economic development.  Most initiatives are owned by either a city or a company, however the majority of clouds are owned by a single entity, as opposed to zones, half of which have multiple owners.  802.11b is still the dominant technology supported, but a significant portion (almost a quarter) uses other radio systems (including 802.11g, WiMax, QDMA, and 900MHz).