The paper addresses the problem of strategic base stations placement in cognitive radio networks. We consider a primary user, operating on the frequency channels of a primary network, and an operator (a leader) facing the competition of a second operator (a follower). These operators are willing to exploit the unused capacity of the primary network and maximize their profits derived from operating the base stations installed and clients served. The leader is aware of the future arrival of the follower, who is able to capture clients by placing its own base stations. It has also to limit the interference power at some measurement points defined by the primary user. We formulate the problem as a bi-level location problem and develop a matheuristic where a mixed integer program derived from the follower’s problem is solved by CPLEX software. We prove that the follower’s problem is NP-hard and the leader’s problem is ΣP2 -hard. Our computational experiments confirm the value of competition for the strategic planning in cognitive radio networks.