Sprint-Nextel’s stock has plummeted in the last year and now can be had for under $3 a share.  The market cap of the company is now under $7 billion and it has been losing money for the last couple of quarters.  Sprint-Nextel has many issues with the largest being the high rate of customers that are leaving for other wireless providers.  While these are large problems that need to be fixed, the net worth of the company without any customers is worth significantly more than its current market cap.  How is this possible?  The answer is the network and spectrum that Sprint-Nextel owns.  Many in the wireless industry believe Sprint-Nextel’s ownership of spectrum in the 1900Mhz and 2.5Ghz bands to be worth easily tens of billions of dollars.  This is just the FCC licenses without the cellular network which would cost many more billions to replicate.  This leaves Sprint-Nextel as an exceptional buy for any company wanting to get into the wireless arena.  The wireless arena will continue to be the hot ticket far into the future as today’s generation expects the Internet to be mobile.  It would be much cheaper for a company such as Google to buy Sprint-Nextel than to deploy its own network.  While the world economy is just beginning its journey through a black hole which will probably last many years, the opportunity to pick up a company at a fraction of its value in a high growth and evolving industry is very very rare.