RSSFCC 700 MHz 'C-block' reserve price finally met
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published January 31, 2008, 11:48 AM
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.
At approximately 11:00 am Eastern Time, the FCC's live auction database reported a bid during round 17 for the C-block of $4,713,823,000. That qualifies under FCC rules as a Potentially Winning Bid (PWB), over the $4.6 billion reserve price. This means if that ends up being the final bid, the winning bidder must promise to open any wireless services it offers on the C-block to the end user's choice of premise or handset equipment.
The identity of the high bidder, as of all bidders, is being kept secret. As of 11:30 am this morning, the minimum ask bid for round 18 is $5.27 billion.
The news remains bad for the D-block, however, to which is attached the stipulation that the winning bidder work with a public/private consortium to operate a first responders' network. Only one bid has been received there for $472 million, still below what was expected.
This is more hype then reality, the C-block does not have that much bandwidth so it cannot be used that well for wireless broadband.
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|I find it hard to view the sale, in perpetuity, of spectrum owned by the American public, a good thing.
If unneeded, it would have been much wiser to rent it out, even for a long period of time if needed, as we can't simply create more spectrum over time.
What if 5-10 years from now we find a great use for these frequencies? Can we even buy them back at dozens of times what we sold them for?
The sale, or auction, is a way for politicians to partially hide fiscal irresponsibility.
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