Could the end of Auction 96 finally be near?
Following a lackluster day of bidding, the Federal Communications Commission’s spectrum auction of 176 economic area licenses in the 1.9 GHz band looks to have perhaps found itself about to call it a day. Through nine new rounds of bidding, $33 million in new potential winning bids were placed, pushing the auction’s total haul to a hair under $1.5 billion.
The auction total is now just $56 million less than the amount Dish Network pledged to bid for all of the 10 megahertz spectrum licenses up for bid prior to the event kicking off on Jan. 22. Dish is participating in the auction under the American H Block Wireless entity, with winning bidders not to be revealed until the auction concludes.
Wednesday witnessed a total of 107 new bids placed, less than half the number of bids that were placed the previous day that also included nine rounds. The latest bids started out rather robust with 29 new bids placed in round 88, before dropping between 16 and six new bids the rest of the day.
As in recent days, bidding activity remains concentrated in markets outside those drawing the big money, with the Syracuse, N.Y.-area license the day’s most expensive license to draw a new bid. All 176 licenses up for grabs remained in the hands of bidders, while all 23 bidders that qualified for the event remained eligible to participate.
Auction 96 was expected to garner between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in total potential winning bids, with some of those funds set to be directed to the FirstNet nationwide public-safety network that the U.S. government has earmarked up to $7 billion in auction proceeds to help fund. However, it looks like that a lack of participating from deep-pocketed larger carriers had kept bidding competitiveness on the low-end of expectations.
Most of the nation’s largest wireless operators are bypassing Auction 96 in order to focus their spectrum-buying efforts on the upcoming AWS-3 auction involving a total of 50 megahertz of spectrum in the 1755-1780/2155-2180 MHz bands adjacent to the 1.7/2.1 GHz spectrum bands currently used by a number of carriers to support LTE rollouts; and the mid-2015 planned auction of 600 MHz spectrum licenses.
Looking to perhaps push the event closer to a conclusion, the FCC announced that it will increase the number of bidding rounds per day to a dozen, with each of those rounds coming in at a short 10 minutes each. The auction is set to conclude once a round does not receive any new bids.
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