AT&T recently announced that it has put the finishing touches on the acquisition of Leap Wireless, which many of you probably know as the parent company of the increasingly popular Cricket Wireless brand.

However, it seems that AT&T is less interested in taking over Cricket than it is in getting to use all of Leap Wireless’s towers and stores, as well as gaining access to the company’s 5.3 million subscribers. And AT&T bought all of this for around $15 a share, which works out to nearly $1.2 billion (although that is short of Leap CEO Dough Hutcheson’s personal estimation of his company’s worth, which he put at $3 billion, according to TechCrunch).

Thus, at least for now, Cricket will be allowed to run as its own separate brand, it will just share a spectrum now with AT&T customers, a move that will likely improve network performance and quality for everyone. This shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone following AT&T closely over the last few years, as the company has been looking at purchasing more and more wireless frequencies over the last year to incorporate more users and voice and data traffic.

AT&T’s list of subscribers will grow from 107 million to 112 million once the acquisition is complete.

[via TechCrunch]