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Bidding In Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion
An anonymous reader sends word that the 2014 wireless spectrum license auction has surpassed $34 billion. "A government auction of airwaves for use in mobile broadband has blown through presale estimates, becoming the biggest auction in the Federal Communications Commission's history and signaling that wireless companies expect demand for Internet access by smartphones to continue to soar. And it's not over yet. Companies bid more than $34 billion as of Friday afternoon for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum, being sold by the F.C.C. That total is more than three times the $10.5 billion reserve price that the commission put on the sale, the first offering of previously unavailable airwaves in six years."
If company A bids 15 million, and company B bids 14.5 billion and company C bids 6 billion, then all the Govt gets is the 15 billion from the top bidder, not the sum total of the bids
When is the government going to auction off the fucking air we breath to the highest bidder?
I understand the whole tragedy of the commons thing, but isnt' there a more equitable way to do the whole airwaves thing?
I have a feeling this is only to fill government coffers a bit, but it screws out poor people. The service and competition in American wireless is really atrocious and it's reflected in the high and stagnant prices.
Scarce limited resource being sold off to the highest bidder and all that money will be spent in 3-4 days.
Who ends up paying for this in the end? You do! $100 a month for 1GB of data and you still pay to receive text messages! Ha-ha! Dumbasses.
I wonder what provisions the government put on the license. Perhaps something about infrastructure to aid in surveillance?
/Tinfoil?
I, for one, welcome our new E-Mag spectrum overlords.
Would it have hurt to mention which government ?
I don't believe for a moment that $34 Billion is being bid for 65 megahertz of spectrum; I suspect there is an error somewhere here. Could it be somewhere closer to 65 Gigahertz?
Part of the problem with the FCC is that they are not following their guideline to promote competition. If you sell a small amount of bandwidth at auction and Verizon and AT&T buy it all up for a crazy amount of money then all the FCC has done is allowed the duopoly to limit competition.
They should put a price tag on the spectrum, provision it out and offer it in turn like a draft. Then the companies can buy positions from one another for other terms that are agreed upon before the draft begins. Much better for competition.
A decent chunk of the money (but way less than half) gets distributed out to the industries that have to move out of this spectrum that they're allocating. There are *lots* of legacy users in this spectrum that will get a small chunk of this money to move out of this spectrum and into other spectrum. That's why these auctions can be so hellishly complicated; before it can even be auctioned, they have to find other spectrum available to move legacy users into, which might require an auction or consolidation itself, etc, etc. You really need a long-term plan to make these kinds of things happen. Some of these industries have been notified for nearly a decade now (if not longer) about their spectrum going away in the future, and hence they've planned for it and just need the money from the auction to wholesale upgrade their entire enterprise and their customers.
Very good point. Was trying to keep it simple. If I recall, the expected relocation costs are in the range of $6B for this spectrum.
Well in addition to better phone performance, $34b is spending on the public welfare. They lose some spectrum from government usage.
This is a free zero cost medium. The spectrum should be opnened up to everyone with power being the only limitation. We are told over and over the spectrum needs to be regulated because of interference yet for all intents and purposes there is nothing in physics that limits information density until you get to the quantum level. Wireless carriers have zero incentive to combat interference when they have a monopoly on the spectrum. They just charge more. It's also obvious to many engineers that mesh networks are more efficient. But mesh networks decentralize authority and therefore affect revenue so meshing is not likely to be popular with incumbent carriers. All those billions will ultimately be paid for be the consumer while the incumbents have zero incentive to innovate. We should take the spectrum away from business people and give it to engineers who can actually do something with it.
These frequencies were taken from the military by threat of a financial gun. The bands are important for national defense, which to me is more important than allowing teenagers to text each other.