Following a weather-induced day of reflection, the Federal Communications Commission’s Auction 96 resumed today with five rounds of bidding. Participants appeared a bit groggy following the previous day’s cancellation due to weather with total new bids totaling just $20 million.
The day opened with some enthusiasm as 54 new potential winning bids were placed in round 43, but that total quickly dipped to just 32 bids in round 44 before spiking to 40 new bids in round 45. Activity held relatively steady in round 46 with 39 new bids before sinking to just 21 new potential winning bids to end the day. In all, new bids pushed the auction’s total to just under $1.26 billion, well short of the more than $1.6 billion most expect the auction to at least bring in.
Most of the more expensive markets remained on the sideline today, with just a pair of the 20 most expensive licenses receiving a new bid today. Those two included licenses centered on Atlanta ($34.5 million) and Denver ($15.8 million). The FCC is withholding the identity of bidders until the auction concludes, which will come once there are no new bids placed. All 23 bidding entities that qualified to participate in the auction remained active at the end of Tuesday.
Dish Network, which is participating in the auction under the American H Block Wireless entity, had said before the auction that it would bid a minimum of $1.5 billion for the H-Block if the FCC would allow Dish to use that band in combination with its adjacent 30 megahertz of spectrum in the 2 GHz band for downlink transmission instead of having to split the spectrum channels for two-way traffic. The H-Block licenses had been split off from Dish’s original holdings in exchange for the company being able to use the spectrum originally set aside for satellite use to support terrestrial services.
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