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Wednesday, August 09, 2006

AWS-1 Auction – Day 1 Summary

Two rounds into the expected marathon auction and the sparring has begun, no-one has landed a heavy punch and certainly no blood has been drawn yet.

AWS-1 Day1

As expected there is a lot of action around the Regional Licenses with everyone who can be bothered bidding at this early stage placing the minimum amount.
• Verizon Wireless has only bid on the big F Block, but not in their original home turf of the North-East;
• Cingular is also focusing on the big F block, adding Hawaii to mainland USA and also experimenting with the BEA blocks for Chicago and New York;
• T-Mobile is bidding in all the Regional Blocks and also a few of the main metropolitan areas in the BEA and CMA bands;
• Wireless DBS is also only bidding on the Regional Blocks;
• Perhaps the only surprise is that SpectrumCo (ie the Cable companies) are bidding on the big regional licenses rather than their home turf.

Also, there seems to be a lack of initial interest in the smaller blocks with a lot of the big metropolitan areas not having received a single bid yet.

But there is a long, long way to go…