WASHINGTON-The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau hired 21 high school students from a local private school to play with its new bidding software to see if they could break it. They didn’t break the software, which also had been tested by graduate students at the University of Arizona, but the students did make about 10 improvements at a cost to the Federal Communications Commission of $50 each.
“We are not communists. … How do you get someone to go into a play auction? You build in incentives,” said Gerald P. Vaughan, WTB deputy bureau chief.
There were three types of incentives. One was a straight salary of $15 per hour. Another was the debugging incentive. The third incentive was for various actions while participating in the play auction. Students were paid $25 if they won a license below budget and were charged $15 if they went above budget. Finally, students were paid $20 if they didn’t overbid. The students were paid based on reports filed after each round. The play auction began on Jan. 20 and concluded last month.
The new software will be used for the 700 MHz commercial auction scheduled for Sept. 12.
Congress in 1999 directed the FCC to auction 36 megahertz of the 60-69 spectrum after reserving 24 megahertz for public safety.
The commercial auction will be for 30 megahertz. Participants in this auction will bid on two licenses in six economic area licenses. One license will be a block of 20 megahertz (a pair of 10-megahertz blocks), and one block of 10 megahertz (a pair of five-megahertz blocks). The FCC will allow bidders in the auction to win both licenses in each area.
The FCC is also allowing participants to use combinatorial, or package, bidding. Package bidding allows parties to bid on individual licenses or to place all-or-nothing bids on up to 12 packages of licenses of their own design. The winning bids are the set of consistent bids on individual licenses and packages that maximize total revenue when the auction closes. Consistent bids are bids that do not overlap and are made or renewed by an individual bidder in the same round.
This is the first time the FCC has used high-school students to test its auction software. Previously it used graduate students from various universities. However, the FCC said graduate schools only want involvement so they can later turn around and be paid consultants for bidders in the real auction. The FCC felt this was inappropriate, so it decided to use high-school students instead, Vaughan said.
The students from St. Anselm’s Abbey School were honored last week at a WTB reception.
St. Anselm’s Abbey was chosen after a public school in Virginia was unable to participate. Vaughan said he just wanted a school, any school so when WTB staffer Patricia M. Rinn told him about St. Anselm’s, he was happy to ask them. St. Anselm’s was founded in 1942 as a school for gifted boys and had the first high-school computer system in the Washington area, said Father Peter Weigand.
Vaughan hopes to expand the program to include all area schools in the future, he said.
