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Mar. 11, 2008

Bid rounds in the nation-wide FCC spectrum auction are moving fast after last week’s transition to Stage Three of the auction for 700 MHz spectrum licenses.

At this stage, there are ten rounds per day, each lasting about 15 minutes.

Monday’s bidding began with Round 185 and included new bids for the cellular market areas of Imperial, Calif., Yuba City, Calif., Hunterdon, N.J., Burlington, N.C., Johnson, Tenn. and the American Samoa territory.

After Round 185, the cumulative bids reached almost US $20 billion. That’s up from about $19.4 million after Round 31, which was a pivotal round for the C block entering its open-access phase.

Nothing has changed for the nationwide C blocks, in which all of the bids are essentially stuck.

Overall, suitors for those licenses ran out of enough bidding units to place any additional offers. Nor is there any resolution to the conundrum of the D block, which is also valuable nationwide spectrum, but which didn’t generate any significant bidding because of federal requirements for its winner to build an emergency network.

A variety of politicians and industry figures are calling for the FCC to end the whole auction now and let the remaining regional licenses trickle to a separate ending.

Regardless of when the official end arrives, attention will shift to who won, who lost and what happens next for the purchased 700 MHz spectrum.

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Source: The FCC.

    This article was featured on Business 5.0.

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