The 700-MHz Auction Is Decadent and Depraved
by John Paczkowski
Posted on February 5, 2008 at 12:01 AM PT
You wouldn’t know it to look at the headlines, but Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo isn’t the only big news in tech this week. The Federal Communications Commission’s 700-MHz spectrum auction took an unexpected turn yesterday when a new bidder emerged for the the highly prized “C” block spectrum, which could be used to build a new national wireless broadband network.
C block bidding now stands at $4.74 billion. But what’s most interesting is how it got there. No bids were made for the C block at all Friday, and the $4.71 billion bid for the block’s national license stood. Then yesterday, eight separate bids were made for the individual regional licenses that comprise the national C license. The sum of those bids totaled $4.74 billion, barely eclipsing the $4.71 billion potential winning bid.
Who made them? We don’t know; bidding is anonymous until the auction concludes. That said, analysts speculate that the bids were likely placed by Verizon. “This could reflect a continued battle between two original bidders–most likely Verizon Wireless and Google–on the C block, or could represent an entirely different bidder or combination of bidders that are exiting the sky-high prices of (another) block,” analysts at Stifel Nicolaus wrote in a research note.
