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FCC Says TV Airwaves Being Sold For Wireless Use Are Worth $86.4 Billion (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday the price of 126 MHz of television airwaves taken from broadcasters to be sold for wireless use in an ongoing auction is $86.4 billion. The FCC disclosed the price in a statement after completing the first part of an auction to repurpose low-frequency wireless spectrum relinquished by television broadcasters. The so-called "broadcast incentive" spectrum auction is one of the commission's most complex and ambitious to date. In this round, called a reverse auction, broadcasters competed to give up spectrum to the FCC for the lowest price. In the next stage, the forward auction, wireless and other companies will bid to buy the airwaves for the highest price. If wireless companies are unwilling to pay $86.4 billion, the FCC may have to hold another round of bidding by broadcasters and sell less spectrum than had been expected, analysts said. The Wall Street Journal points out that $86.4 billion is more than the market cap of T-Mobile and Spring combined. It's roughly double the amount raised in the last FCC auction, where ATT spent $18.2 billion and Verizon spent $10.4 billion. It's highly likely we'll see multiple rounds stretching into 2017 that will eventually match the supply with the demand.
Private property in the means of production, and generalized commodity exchange, automatically will select the best outcomes for everyone.
This is true because HUMAN NATURE made it so.
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Unlike the US and EU, we Canadians are smart enough not to sell valuable resources like our wireless spectrum to the highest bidder. It's yet another sign of the problems that will plague these troubled nations going forward. The US and EU will collapse soon and everyone will see the failed states for what they are. The Brexit and Puerto Rico bankruptcies were just the beginning. Canada will be the next dominant superpower when the US and EU fall apart.
Why this is being sold, rather than leased?
Shouldn't this just be like a 5-15 year lease to the spectrum for whatever amount the companies are willing to bid?
'Sale' sounds rather permanent, and divvying up a limited resource, like the airwaves even for ridiculous sums of money like 90 billion, seems rather anti-competitive to me.
Why are we selling these airwaves? We should be renting them by the month. This prevents the wastefulness and hoarding of resources by a company that never plans to use them. What if some company buys them all up and never uses them in hopes that they double in price in the next 10 years due to scarcity?
I said nearly the exact same thing as a solution for keeping the IPV4 address space from running out, as most of the space is currently being hoarded by large organizations that don't need full Class A blocks:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Just remember, this is the FCC that gives the people exactly 0% of the designated broadcast spectrum. The FCC that is owned, lock stock and barrel by commercial interests.
Cue the idiot defenders of the FCC. They're always around.
Why not ?
Meshing routers could cover large areas cheaply !
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
It's gonna be whoever uses wireless service, which is basically everyone.
1. Mobile phone operator pays the FCC 86 billion to establish a monopoly.
2. Consumer is forced to purchase mobile service only from operator (who has a monopoly enforced by the government).
3. Profit!! For the mobile phone operator (who has no competition) also
I think a lot of people in rural areas got a raw deal from this digital TV signal upgrade, because it makes it impossible to pick up a lot of stations you used to be able to tune in with the old analog system.
Where we live, for example? We're about a 70 minute drive away from Washington DC (with many people in town commuting to/from the DC area daily for work), yet you can't pick up the DC network stations over the air. (Well, you *might* get 1 or 2 if you aim the right antenna just the right way -- but you won't get the number of them you did before things went digital.)
I never understood why repeaters weren't implemented to boost the digital OTA signals, to ensure good coverage? Couldn't a piece of the funds received by selling off the old frequencies go to this?
What area does spring cover? Ive never heard of them before. Then again maybe they ment sprint.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
$1 million * seconds_per_day
I can see the hidden patterns.... But what do they MEAN?
OK that means that the mobile phone companies think can hoard and monopolize the spectrum such that they extort far greater that $200 per person just to pay for the spectrum. That's a significant amount on your bill thanks to the spectrum auction.
There's gotta be a better way.
The FCC doesn't own them, so we will use them whenever we like.