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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.
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:
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