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Cingular today announced that it has agreed to sell its Mobitex business to a New York-based capital management firm. The terms of the agreement with Cerberus Capital Management were not disclosed, and the deal is subject to regulatory approval. According to Cingular’s press release Cerberus will acquire the network, customer support operations and “a majority” of Cingular Interactive’s customer base of nearly 750K subscribers. No mention of whether Cerberus will also get the network operations staff or will have to contract that from Cingular, nor was billing mentioned in the press release. Cingular will retain its direct sale Mobitex customers and will also resell Mobitex under a long-term agreement with Cerberus.

This announced deal puts to rest several years of rumor and speculation about the future of the US network, which is by far the world’s largest dedicated wireless data network. Cerberus gets an extremely robust network with a solid customer base of happy customers in various “vertical” markets such as field force management, fleet services and telemetry. While many of the BlackBerry customers on the network – especially government and public safety users – are extremely loyal, many of them are also vulnerable to other carriers who offer newer BlackBerry handhelds. But no voice network can match Mobitex’ performance, and no application makes this more evident than BlackBerry.

This deal should also be good news for Mobitex Technology AB, which recently purchased the Mobitex infrastructure business from Ericsson. Cerberus will likely fund renewed capital investment in the network; investment in Mobitex infrastructure has been all but impossible in Cingular given the various entities competing for capital. Cingular will not only be able to keep its largest customers happy with Mobitex but also will find its own data strategy cleaned up quite a bit, especially given the impending closing of the AT&T Wireless acquisition and the focus on deploying EDGE/UMTS. All in all, it sounds like a good move, assuming a reasonably clean business deal, of course.