Somehow, someway, the Federal Communications Commission’s Auction 96 made it to the weekend as bids continued to trickle in.
Friday witnessed 82 new bids through the 12 rounds of activity, which was actually a slight increase from the previous day. Nearly half of the new bids were concentrated in a single round (114), which saw 39 new bids placed in furry of action through that round’s 10 minutes. Half of the day’s rounds could only muster two bids each, though with the mid-day spike, each round averaged almost seven new bids. The auction is set to end once a round does not receive any new bids.
The new bids added $12 million to the auction’s total haul, which stood at $1.535 billion to close out the week. That amount crept closer to the $1.565 billion Dish Network pledged to pay for the 176 spectrum licenses up for bid, each consisting of 10 megahertz of spectrum in the upper 1.9 GHz band. Only a small percentage of potential winning bids were at or above the 50 cents per-megahertz/per-potential customer offer Dish Network had offered for all of the licenses, though a number of the more expensive licenses were substantially over that mark.
Actual license winners won’t be known until the auction concludes, though many speculate the Dish Network’s American H Block Wireless bidding entity will walk away with most of the licenses up for bid, especially those concentrated in the nation’s larger markets. The H-Block licenses stand adjacent to Dish Network’s current spectrum licenses.
The auction is set to continue on Monday, with 12 rounds of new bidding on the docket.
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