Southern LINC, Southern Company’s commercial, digital wireless communication service provider, has entered into an agreement to sell 201 of its tower structures to Sarasota, Fla.-based Pinnacle Towers, Inc. Southern LINC will become Pinnacle’s anchor tenant on these towers and will retain ownership of the towers’ electronics and power systems, which are required to operate the system and which help make the Southern LINC network the most reliable iDEN network in the world today.

“It’s simple. This allows Southern LINC employees to focus on our business, which is providing the best digital wireless communication service possible to customers, while Pinnacle maintains the tower structures to our exacting standards,” explained Bob Dawson, president of Southern LINC. “With Pinnacle focused on the ‘real estate,’ our customers can be assured we’ll be concentrating our resources on the development of new products and features and continual enhancement of the Southern LINC service we provide.”

Southern LINC and Pinnacle Towers plan to work together to acquire and build additional tower sites to enhance Southern LINC’s coverage and strengthen its existing footprint. All future towers will conform to Southern LINC’s specifications, which are designed to ensure the most reliable communications even under the worst of weather conditions.

Pinnacle Towers Inc., headquartered in Sarasota, Fla., is one of the nation’s leading companies in the wireless communication tower rental business. Pinnacle Towers is backed by Boston-based ABRY Partners, an $825 million private equity firm, investing predominately in media-related businesses. The Southern LINC system covers more than 120,000 square miles in the Southeast, including both major metro and rural areas. Using Motorola’s integrated Digital Enhanced Network (iDEN) technology, Southern LINC combines multiple communication services into one handheld or installed device including Instant LINC, the feature that lets users push a button and immediately speak with one person or an entire work group, phone service, numeric and text paging and data transmission.

Southern Company (NYSE: SO), the largest producer of electricity in the United States, is the parent firm of Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power, Mississippi Power and Savannah Electric. Based in Atlanta, Southern Company, through its Southern Energy Inc. subsidiary, supplies electricity in 10 countries on four continents. Southern Company also provides energy-related marketing, trading and technical services and wireless telecommunications. Its common stock is one of the 20 most widely held corporate stocks in America.