AWS auction bidding continues to slow

WASHINGTON—Bidding has slowed dramatically in the advanced wireless services spectrum auction, also known as Auction 66, with an average of about 140 new bids placed in the last few rounds.

The three previous rounds had averaged 170 new bids per round, and the three rounds before those garnered 240 bids on average.

Some highlights as of round 50:

AWS Wireless Inc., backed by NextWave Telecom Inc., had bid a total of $108 million for 156 spectrum licenses that cover a population of about 70 million; SpectrumCo L.L.C., the bidding entity of Sprint Nextel Corp. and its cable partners, had high bids on 128 licenses covering about 257 million potential customers. The JV has committed $2.2 billion to its high bids; T-Mobile USA Inc. held on to 126 licenses totaling almost $4 billion, covering 467 million pops.

Other bidders with significant numbers of high bids on licenses as of round 50 were Leap Wireless International Inc. with 70 licenses totaling $901.5 million and Cingular Wireless L.L.C. bidding $1.2 billion for 42 licenses.

The auction has raised $13.4 billion to date, and 1,006 of the 1,122 licenses offered have received bids. Of licenses of have not received bids, about 100 are the geographically small 20-megahertz, A-block cellular market areas in states such as Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky and Florida. The other dozen or so licenses cover areas such as Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the Gulf of Mexico.