FCC's Wireless Spectrum Auction Picks Up Steam
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With 36 rounds of bidding concluded Wednesday morning, the Federal Communications Commission auction of the highly coveted 700-megahertz band of the wireless spectrum has shifted to a faster-paced stage 2. Under rules designed to promote more competition, the number of new bids rose from 87 in Round 35 to 203 in Round 36.
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Consumers rejoice, Verizon fumes Good news for smartphone users. Bad news for the big name wireless carriers. FCC chairman Kevin Martin has released suggested rules for an upcoming radio-spectrum auction that would allow consumers to attach any device and any application to U.S. broadband wireless networks - without approval from the likes of AT&amp;T and Verizon Wireless.â¦
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Bidding begins on Thursday in a crucial auction of government-owned airwaves that is expected to help set the future course of the U.S. telecommunications business.
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At the close of the first full day of&#160;bidding for 700MHz wireless spectrum&#160;Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission reported nearly $2.8 billion in provisional winning bids.There were 1,122 new bids filed in the second of two rounds that was held in the afternoon. The total value of all provisional bid winners jumped 15 percent from the morning bidding round, when $2.4 billion was offered.A total of 1,099 licenses can be bid upon, although only 902 had received bids by the end of the day.All the bids are filed anonymously and bidders are prohibited from publicly discussing their bids in an effort to reduce anticompetitive behavior, the FCC said.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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The minimum bid of $4.6 billion was made on Thursday in the FCC's 700Mhz spectrum auction triggering an rule that will force the license winner to allow any device and any application on the network.
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The FCC releases names of 266 companies officially planning to bid in the government's upcoming 700-MHz-spectrum auction. More than half those botched their initial applications, including big names like Verizon, AT&T,  Qualcomm and Alltel. They have until Jan. 4 to qualify for the auction.
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The high bids totalled $3.2 billion in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission&#39;s&#160;auction of wireless spectrum licenses in the 700MHz band&#160;after three rounds and a day and a half of bidding.
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In what will certainly come as relief to advocates of open access rules for wireless services, someone this morning placed a bid for the jewel-in-the-crown "C-block" of spectrum just above the minimum reserve trigger price.
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The debate heats with some tech companies pushing Congress and the FCC to restrict spectrum use in latest auction.
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Bids in the F.C.C.âs auction for wireless spectrum reached the governmentâs $10 billion goal. One problem: bidding for the biggest block of frequencies stalled at $4.3 billion, below the $4.6 billion reserve price.
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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has approved the purchase by AT&amp;T of 12MHz of wireless spectrum that covers 60 percent of the U.S.AT&amp;T bought the spectrum from Aloha Spectrum Holdings. The spectrum, in the highly coveted 700MHz band, covers 196 million of the 303 million U.S. residents and includes 72 of the top 100 media markets in the country. Aloha acquired the spectrum in earlier FCC auctions and from other auction winners. This portion of the 700MHz spectrum is not part of the&#160;FCC auction&#160;now in progress.The FCC, in an order issued Monday, approved the sale despite concerns expressed by the commission&#39;s two Democratic members. AT&amp;T announced in October that it intended to buy the spectrum for $2.5 billion. The company said then it planned to use the spectrum for broadcast video or for two-way communications such as voice, data or multicast content.The 700MHz spectrum band carries wireless signals three to four times farther than some higher spectrum bands, making it optimal for long-range broadband networks.Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said he voted to approve the deal because of a lack of public opposition, but he had concerns about the FCC&#39;s review of the deal.The agency&#39;s review &quot;lacks both substance and analysis in its review of whether, on balance, the transaction serves the public&#39;s interest,&quot; Adelstein said in a statement. &quot;We are required to do more than simply conclude that a transaction benefits the public and will not have an adverse effect on competition. I would have preferred to see a more thorough assessment weighing the potential public interest harms and benefits of this transaction and its impact on the mobile telephony market.&quot;Commissioner Michael Copps voted against the deal. The deal could have a large impact on a mobile voice and data market &quot;that has seen round after round of consolidation in recent years,&quot; he said in a statement.Copps also raised concerns about the FCC&#39;s review of the deal. The review &quot;contains only an extremely abbreviated analysis of the competitive effects of this change in ownership,&quot; he said.AT&amp;T, in a statement, said it was pleased with the FCC&#39;s decision. The deal will help AT&amp;T meet growing customer demand for wireless services, the company said.
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The search giant said it was interested in a share of wireless spectrum being auctioned off by the federal government â if certain conditions are met.
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Bidding remained stalled Tuesday on  a key piece of spectrum in the U.S. government's wireless  airwaves auction, prompting concern regulators will have to  modify rules requiring some of it be shared with public safety  agencies.
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An undisclosed bidder yesterday met the government's minimum asking price at an auction for one of technology's most coveted assets: airwaves that will be used to build a new wireless network.
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When Verizon Wireless filed an almost perfunctorily brief lawsuit against the FCC in a federal appeals court on Monday, analysts and wireless industry observers were baffled. With the FCC having written up the 700 MHz spectrum auction order in late July, didn't the company have enough time to complain then? Surprisingly, a clue to its motives comes not from itself or its lawsuit but from the FCC.
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One of the major questions as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission kicks off a multibillion-dollar spectrum auction Thursday is whether the auction will produce a winning bidder that will challenge telecom and cable-based broadband providers with a national wireless broadband network.Other questions will also be answered in coming weeks as the auctions, for 62MHz of long-range, high-speed spectrum, unfold. Will Google or another bidder buy enough spectrum to launch a &quot;third pipe&quot; broadband network? Will any bidders step forward and pledge to build a nationwide broadband and voice network for emergency response agencies?The bids to watch in the 700MHz auctions are for the C block, a 22MHz band of spectrum broken up into 12 regional licenses, and the D block, 10MHz of auctioned spectrum paired with another 10MHz set aside for a combined national commercial/emergency response agency network. Startup Frontline Wireless, one of the primary backers of the public-private model for an emergency responder network, announced in December that&#160;it had ceased operations.&quot;The pull-out of Frontline leaves the whole D Block auction up in the air,&quot; analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates said in an e-mail. &quot;There is no way to know if a last-minute group will come on board. While the goal of establishing a universal network for public safety/security is a laudable goal, it is not the most lucrative area from a pure business perspective, so it is not clear how much demand there might be or who might step up to the plate to make this work.&quot;The FCC may have made a mistake in adopting the plan by Frontline, a company with former FCC chairman Reed Hundt as its vice chairman, said Carlyn Taylor, a senior managing director in business consultancy FTI&#39;s corporate finance practice.&quot;I&#39;m not sure how well [Frontline&#39;s plan] hung together from a financial standpoint,&quot; Taylor said. &quot;I&#39;m not sure anybody else is going to try to do what Frontline says they were going to do. There doesn&#39;t seem to be anybody else with a similar approach.&quot;If any other company bids on the D block, it will be much less than the FCC would have received without the national public safety network build-out rules, Taylor said.But the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST), the nonprofit group of emergency response agency representatives that&#160;controls the public safety portion of the spectrum, said earlier this month it continues to support the FCC plan for the D block. The FCC should &quot;do all that it can&quot; to advance the public-private partnership meant to bring about the nationwide public safety broadband network, said Harlin McEwen, the PSST&#39;s chairman, in a statement. &quot;While it would not be appropriate for the PSST to comment on any potential bidder&#8217;s strategy, we want to restate our enthusiasm for and commitment to what the FCC has done.&quot;In the C block, the FCC required that&#160;winning bidders operate under open-access rules, meaning the winning bidder must allow any legal devices to connect to the network and allow customers to access any legal Web content of their choosing. Google, which pushed for the open-access rules, has&#160;pledged to bid at least $4.6 billion for the C block, and the FCC later set that figure as the minimum price it will accept.FCC rules prohibit potential bidders such as Google from commenting on their spectrum plans in the run-up to the auction. Bidding is anonymous, but the FCC will release some information about the auctions at its auction Web page.But several wireless industry observers have suggested that Google may not want to win the C block spectrum. Google, by getting the FCC to adopt the open-access rules and by pushing Verizon Wireless and AT&amp;T to&#160;open up their current wireless networks to outside devices and applications, has already accomplished much of what it has wanted, Taylor said.&quot;I think it&#39;s fairly widely believed that [Google] doesn&#39;t really want to be the actual carrier,&quot; Taylor said. &quot;That doesn&#39;t mean they still wouldn&#39;t buy spectrum and then work with somebody else who&#39;s a carrier.&quot;A subcontracting arrangement with a wireless carrier would make sense for Google, she said.Blair Levin, a telecom analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus &amp; Co., also doubts Google will be a major player in the C block bidding. With the U.S. stock markets tanking in recent weeks, Google may not want to spend $10 billion to build a national network, he said, referring to the estimated cost.Before the FCC set the auction rules in July, Google had also inquired about the legality of selling spectrum on a wholesale basis. The FCC ruled that such a plan would be legal.In addition to the current wireless giants AT&amp;T and Verizon Wireless, other companies to watch are the cable television providers, satellite TV providers and handset maker Qualcomm, Taylor said. Qualcomm and cable provider Cox were among the 214 bidders approved by the FCC this month.Look for wireless carriers such as AT&amp;T and Verizon to bid defensively, she said. &quot;If the traditional mobile carriers really are the final winners of most of the spectrum, then nothing interesting happens,&quot; she said. &quot;They don&#39;t want to see some major new entrant coming in.&quot;Falling stock prices on Wall Street may discourage some competing bidders, with the auction coming at &quot;precisely a bad time&quot; for investment in a new nationwide network, Taylor said. But these auctions may be the last chance for a third nationwide broadband network, she added.The 700MHz spectrum band carries wireless broadband signals three to four times farther than some higher spectrum bands, making it perfect for long-range broadband networks. &quot;If you&#39;re going to build a green-field network from scratch, you want to build it at low megahertz like this,&quot; Taylor said. &quot;If anybody was seriously considering launching a fully new competitor ... from scratch, this is the chance. There isn&#39;t going to be another one, probably.&quot;
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A $1.3 billion reserve price for a piece of wireless spectrum to be auctioned by the FCC in January is too high, according to one company.