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FCC Puts 4.6 Billion Minimum Bid on Spectrum Auction
ChainedFei writes "Wired News notes that the Spectrum auction is moving forward, with the FCC placing a minimum bid for the C-block spectrum being offered at $4.6 billion. That, coincidentally, was the amount that Google fronted as a minimum bid to endorse certain open standards for the spectrum being sold. This is essentially a move to shut out smaller possible competitors while also maximizing the money the auction will generate for the grade-A areas of the spectrum. In addition, any single bidder wishing to purchase the entirety of the spectrum must front a minimum of $10 billion. 'According to the FCC, nearly all of that C block aggregate reserve price will go toward a package of U.S. national licenses. This portion of the spectrum also happens to be the one with two open access conditions attached to its sale mandating that all devices be allowed to access the band and that all applications can be able to run across the network. If the reserve price isn't met, the auction will be rerun without these two conditions in place, according to the FCC.'"
An article from July.
The company would like the FCC to embrace four additional conditions as part of the auction rules: open applications, open devices, open services, and open networks. Should the FCC agree to do so, Schmidt says that Google will jump in on the bidding at the FCC's $4.6 billion reserve price.Ars has much better info and commentary on the auction. Basically tho, Att can try to outbid google, however, there are requirements that the auction winner has to abide or they lose the spectrum.
m hz-auction-whats-really-up-for-grabs-and-why-it-wo nt-be-monopolized.html/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070815-700
Just seems like a fund raiser to me, FCC is short on cash somewhere and saw an opening to make a buck or two. Can anyone explain what range of the Electromagnetic Spectrum the FCC has control of?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Nope, it's not like eBay - the bidding goes on until nobody wants to increase their bid. The bids go in rounds - one round per day, to begin with. If nobody bids on a particular license in (I believe) two consecutive rounds, then bidding on that license is complete. Once things get very close to being done, and only a few licenses are still outstanding (i.e. up in the air), the FCC can accelerate the process to 2 or 3 rounds per day, to bring the entire process to a close.
The problem with the current system is that it still based on century-old technology. Your radio works the way your grandad's radio worked, listening to a HUGE ass chunk of the spectrum to pick up a relatively small amount of data.
Contrast that to the way satellite radio (for example) works. Satellite radio has about 50Mhz of the S band for 150 channels of content. FM radio has about a 5th of the channels in about 5 times the spectrum...Massively inefficient.
Build a smarter radio that is capable of identifying specific traffic, and you can have people broadcasting digitally on the same bands all the time without a whole lot of problem. Sure, you'll have occasional overlaps, but it would be relatively trivial to split the same space among 10 times as many broadcasters with a shift in transmission protocol.
It may sound complex, but it's the exact same way TCP/IP works, and TCP/IP works fine on a far far far more limited transmission medium...Hell, TCP/IP is an adaptation of the old Aloha protocol which was itself originally a way to conserve broadcast bandwidth. The FCC really needs to move into the 20th century...The 21st century would be even better if at all possible.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
We had two of these fiascoes. One was Nextwave, which overbid and promptly filed for bankruptcy back in 1996, trying up spectrum for ten years, at which point they started selling their licenses to incumbents such as Verizon. Here's a summary from 2005:
A similar sad story happened in the 1980's, when UPS succesfully lobbied the FCC to take away VHF spectrum from ham radio, but by the time they got it, they decided they didn't want it. You can read a summary which I won't quote here. They auctioned it off, then had to go investigate the licensees to see if they were using it. Then they auctioned it off again in June 2007, and realized (according to the preceeding link, if I read it correctly), about $200,000.
In a couple of years, when they decide to do it again, I hope Charles Simoyni (who got his ham license when he went on board ISS), will buy it all and give it back to the hams.
If some of the wireless device manufacturors got together and put together a consortium to bid for the spectrum, I don't see how the big telcos could match the bids.
:(
att and verizon are big but not that big. I guess we'll see during the bid...
actually: ignore me, from forbes 500, I see that verizon is 13th with 93b revenue and att is 27th with 63b. The closest techie is M$ with 44b (all 2006 numbers)
So, it's not a streach to see this happen...
Ben
Regurgitating, eh? I'm an extra class amateur radio operator and I hold an FCC commercial radio operator's license (used to be a first class license, guess it still is, sort of, though they don't give them out any longer.) My name is found in more than one edition of the radio amateur's handbook as an innovator, I received technical achievement of the year from a television group at the Dayton hamvention, and some of well known ham radio manufacturer AEA's commercial products were of my design, as well as my responsibility to get tested for FCC approval. My designs have been on the front cover of 73 and reviewed extensively in 73, CQ, and QST magazines - and elsewhere. I've been the engineer at several 10kw through 100kw radio stations, I've been a DJ (progressive rock), and I've even had my fingers in pirate radio a couple of times. Also related to all this, I'm a musician and a recording engineer.
So it could just possibly be that I might have my own informed opinion on these matters, rather than just parroting what you appear to think is mindless slashdot groupthink. Now, for your edification, Here's a short (and woefully incomplete) list of things I can't do for the "common good" by specific FCC edict:
And of course, the amateur radio bands that I am allowed to transmit upon are only available to me because I have passed several technical tests according to the requirements of the FCC; your average citizen has no access to the amateur bands as you should know, and so you cannot hold up the amateur bands as a resource for Joe or Jane blow to do anything in particular with. Not that they are very useful what with all the restrictions on what we can do with them, anyway.
I think that you and I fundamentally disagree on what the phrase "common good" actually means.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.