The FCC's auction for prime 700 MHz territory nationwide is over: The auction took in nearly $20b before discounts for small businesses and other credits, but the FCC didn't disclose the winners. 1,099 licenses were at stake, with the 6 C Block licenses ($4.74b winning bid) were the ones most watched. The others shouldn't be ignored, even though taken one at a time, most of them are quite limited in geographic coverage. With that spectrum, regional operators will be able to build interesting networks that could compete with national players.
The big failure in the auction was the D Block, a national chunk of shared public/private spectrum that a winning bidder would operate in a manner that gave priority to emergency uses. The minimum bid was far from met: $1.4b was the reserve price, and bids never topped $500m. Rules for the block will have to be redesigned and rebid.
You may want to take a look at the Lower Band A & B Block Licenses and how much money was spent on each. Even thou these are Local and regional they went for some serious $$$.
Example:
Why would a Georgetown SC License (CMA629-B)a B Block License go for over $5.9Million when it covers just two small Counties in Coastal SC?
Why would a provider bid $8.9Million for a Regional A Block (BAE025-A) covering parts of 2 States (SC & NC) out of Wilmington NC??
The Big Upper Band C Blocks winners will get all the attention but the most interesting story near term will be who was bidding on these lower Band A & B Blocks and what are they planning to do with these small Licenses??
AT&T was a major player in these smaller License in that they need the Spectrum to play in the new LTE systems coming from Ericsson using 700Mhz. They already own a large chunk of the Lower Band 700Mhz C Block they bought from Aloha Networks and can patch together a Nationwide Lower Band License with new wins.
Another area of interest would be to get a list of the primary bidders on each spectrum as well as the winners-Not sure if the FCC will provide.
700Mhz and WiMAX:
Another area of interest will be how many small Service Providers won 700Mhz license and plan to use them with WiMAX. This would be a killer network and cause the Carriers serious problems for about 3-4 years until LTE comes to the market.
Will be interesting. Airspan/Telsima and SONUS all have 700Mhz WIMAX radios on the drawing boards
or waiting for Silicon-18Months
Jim
I still think WiMAX on 700 MHz will not happen. The vast majority of the license bidders are cell carriers, and they plan on using the spectrum for their cell networks.
Even if there are a few small operators who won licenses and would like operate WiMAX on 700MHz, they will find the equipment too expensive and the available bandwidth too limiting for a multi-megabit broadband network. They'll be able to make more money by leasing their licenses to carriers than they could by operating a WiMAX network.