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August 9, 2006

Yet Another Spectrum Auction

By Glenn Fleishman

I won’t be covering Auction 66 for 3G spectrum as closely as the air-to-ground one: I swear. The current auction involves a number of licenses in 1700 and 2100 MHz for advanced wireless services (AWS). Auction 66 should bring in nearly $15b. Sprint is not bidding, but the partnership of cable multiple systems operators (MSOs) are under the name SpectrumCo. DirecTV and EchoStar are bidding as Wireless DBS LLC.

T-Mobile needs these licenses, baby, they need them bad, if they ever want to move beyond GPRS and EDGE in the U.S., and have competitive 3G services. T-Mobile bid $437m out of a $769m bid just this morning. Over $4b was put on deposit to qualify by all bidders. T-Mobile has $584m on deposit.

Cingular and Verizon Wireless are also bidding for important regions, as well as Space Data, the folks who will shoot up balloons with cell towers on them in less-populated areas. There were 168 bidders qualified by the FCC to place offers, and the bidding will go on and on and on. The new frequencies that will be made available are certainly a big part of Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile’s plans to offer more network-intensive multimedia services.

Posted by Glennf at August 9, 2006 3:25 PM

Categories: Financial, Spectrum

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