Lord Young gets £8m windfall from Spectrum sale The 80-year old technophile, who was also enterprise adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron, sold Spectrum Interactive to the broadcasting and mobile tower business Arqiva for £23.4m. He holds 10.2m shares in the Hertfordshire-based firm, which was delisted from AIM in 2010. Arqiva was one of the early movers in public wi-fi hotspots, targeting hotels and airports and establishing lucrative deals to provide wi-fi services to the likes of Whitbread, British Airways and Premier Inn. The firm also operates 1,800 payphones but these are unlikely to be of much interest to Arqiva. However, the company was severely hurt by the rapid growth in mobile usage, which rendered pay-phones almost obsolete, and Lord Young eventually took the firm private at 7p a share. The sale marks Arqiva's biggest acquisition since 2007, when it bought National Grid Wireless for £2.5bn, and the first major move by John Cresswell, the former ITV director, who took the helm as chief executives last year. Mr Cresswell the deal will make Arqiva into the only wholesaler of public wi-fi not to retail the services itself. "We are well placed to help define the wi-fi space for all UK landlords and business providers, allowing us to individually tailor services for our customers to meet the growing demand for data capacity," he said.