US carrier Cricket Communications has inked a five-year wholesale agreement with Clearwire. With the agreement, Cricket will become the second operator signed on to leverage Clearwire's forthcoming LTE Advanced-ready network, which will provide capacity off-load services to supplement Cricket's own LTE network. 

Cricket currently plans to deploy LTE across approximately two-thirds of its current network footprint over the next two to three years and to cover up to approximately 25 million POPs with LTE network technology in 2012.

"The high-speed 4G LTE networks we are deploying will complement our current robust 3G network and allow us to continue innovating value for our Cricket customers. We believe this agreement with Clearwire provides us with an attractive option to supplement our own LTE build-out strategy and gives us the flexibility to access additional 4G capacity where needed as data-centric devices continue to become more popular," said Doug Hutcheson, President and CEO of Leap Wireless, Cricket's parent company.