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Wireless Auction Ends With Mixed Feelings
Macworld is reporting that the conclusion of the wireless auction has ended with many participants having mixed feelings. While bigger companies hailed it as a success, including Google who didn't actually bid to win but was able to get open access rules introduced, many smaller companies were left feeling that they were doomed from the start. "A former mail carrier, McBride has been trying his luck at FCC auctions since 1996. He said new rules for the auction favored large companies with deep pockets. For example, the FCC shortened the amount of time that the winners would have to build their networks. "All that did was prevent small businesses from coming in. They were scared of the build-out requirements," he said."
I remember the US Army contract index had this little requirement for some filing cabinets to have "three letter names in the (can't recall) font" which of course limited the contracts to just IBM... until Commodore renamed itself Commodore Business Machines (CBM) and Digital became DEC.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I didn't win but I wanted open access. Why isn't everyone who didn't win but wanted open access a hero?
Auctions favour those with more money at hand!
News at 11.
>A former mail carrier, McBride has been trying his luck at FCC auctions since 1996.
Darl, is that you?Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Who would want a small company to win a part of the spectrum? By definition, they wouldn't be able to use it universally for all Americans. If some New York only company bought it and never spread across the country or took 10 years to expand that large, the entire rest of the country wouldn't be able to use it immediately. But nationwide cellphone companies can implement it immediately to increase quality and number of available connections to a single tower for just about everyone everywhere. That's even important for when cell towers fail from too much traffic when everyone gets on their cell after an emergency like a natural disaster. That's way better than some company nobody's heard of making 10,000 wireless routers and tunrning great profits but effectively only being able to offer their product to 0.001% of America because of their limited size. That's like being a small patent troll company and sitting on some wonderful technology and not letting anyone else use it. Too bad cell companies are evil, greedy bastards.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The FCC isn't stupid, they know who is going to do productive things with the airwaves
Which is kind of a silly remark. The hares in the U.S. (i.e. the big cellular outfits) have done far less with the spectrum they have than their counterparts in other countries. The very last people I want in charge of our rate of progress are the goddamn Telcos, whose sole motivation is to squeeze any threatening innovators out of the market, and then squeeze their existing infrastructure (and us!) for every last drop of blood. That's precisely what this auction was all about, no more and no less. I'm glad the Google got those open access rules in place for some pieces of spectrum, but the reality is that the Telcos know they can pretty much just ignore it and do business as usual. The Feds have teeth, true, but when it comes to the telephone companies they refuse to bite.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I don't think that fits in this case. The smaller companies are more nimble and can adapt faster. So, they are the hare. The large companies are still slow to change and can't get anything done quickly, so they are the tortoise. The only difference now is, rather than winning because the hare is lazy and overconfident, the tortoise wins by using its vast resources to buy itself a race car and hiring goons (ie, the government) to break the hare's legs before the race starts.
I think explaining to Wall Street why you just plunked down $19 billion for something you're not using would be a pretty tough sell.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
In 95-96, the FCC bid out a bunch of frequencies, and there were special Congressional mandates to allow "small businesses" to compete - mainly, very little deposit. Nextwave bought up a whole lot of licenses, and other companies did as well. Then the market took a downturn, and the value of the licenses dropped, and a lot of the participants declared bankruptcy. In Nextwave's case, the FCC "repossessed" the licenses for non-payment, but it was reversed by the court, and Nextwave was given relief. Then the business cycle turned again, and the licenses were worth 3x as much as Nextwave paid for them. The speculation was that they were going to sell them off for an insane profit. The word around the communications industry was they were really just a shell company and never intended to build, just to sell them off later. It looks like they kept the frequencies and are rolling out WiMax on it - *10 YEARS* after the frequencies were auctioned.
The construction provisions are there to make sure that the spectrum actually gets used and not held as an investment. In addition, most S/W/DBE's that get involved in government doings are a fraud: 50.5% of the company is "owned" by a woman, who just happens to be the wife of the CEO and owner of the other 49.5%. Or construction "general contractors" who hire's a "prime subcontractors" - i.e the real general contractor - to do 100% of the scope. Their price to the government? The price that the GC bid plus 1%. So on a $10,000,000 Baltimore City school job, some guy sitting in an office made $100,000, never set foot on site, and never dealt with the city or the other subcontractors.
There is a Nextwave in existence now, but if the WiMax service they are
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson