CINGULAR JETTISONS INTERACTIVE DIVISION

Cingular Wireless announced last week that it will sell its Cingular Interactive subsidiary — including its Mobitex enterprise messaging network — to private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management for an undisclosed sum.

Both Cingular Wireless and Cerberus declined comment. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The 10-year-old Mobitex packet-data network once served as the dominant data pipe for Research In Motion's BlackBerry messaging service, and even now accounts for about 25% of all BlackBerry usage worldwide. Nevertheless, the Mobitex subscriber base has declined in recent years as many users have migrated to Cingular's general packet radio service network: As of June 30, Cingular Interactive reported 735,000 customers, down 6.7% from the previous year.

Cingular said it would retain all direct e-mail customers and continue purchasing data services from Cingular Interactive.

The sale comes a few months after Cingular Interactive outlined plans to transform the Mobitex network into a home for machine-to-machine applications.

“We've spent a year putting this strategy together, and we want to become the pre-eminent M2M player,” Cingular Interactive Vice President Tom Langan told Telephony during April's M2M Expo event in Dallas.