Katie Fehrenbacher at GigOm says:
The FCC just released a list of 168 qualified bidders for the AWS spectrum auction coming up on August 9th, and also announced that the process will not involve the controversial blind bidding. We’ve been following the companies interested in bidding pretty closely, and there were a few surprises in the FCC filings, including a group tied to Rupert Murdoch, DirecTV and Echostar, which put down almost a billion dollars that it can use to bid on spectrum.
Wireless DBS, the consortium tied to Echostar, DirecTV, News Corp, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Echostar’s Charles Ergen, qualified to bid and paid one of the largest upfront payments out of the list of interested bidders, of $972.55 million. The group’s auction plans might involve WiMAX, and prove to be crucial to these companies future as triple play becomes common place. (The upfront payment is refundable if the company doesn’t win the specturm it desires, but could be an indicator of how much the companies are willing to spend.)
The cable consortium SpectrumCo, tied to cable companies Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner Cable and Comcast CEO and Chairman Brian Roberts, among others, qualified to bid and put down another large upfront payment of $637.71 million. Other cable groups like the Washington Post’s Cable One qualified and paid an upfront payment of $3.5 million. The Dolan Family, tied to Charles Dolan, Cablevision’s Chairman, qualified and paid an upfront fee of $149.98 million.
The FCC’s pdf list is here. T-Mobile paid $583.52 million, Cingular paid $500 million, and a Verizon affiliated company paid $383.34 million in upfront fees.
But why would Echostar/DirecTV pour almost a $1 billion into AWS when all the talk is over a Clearwire/DirecTV deal for Mobile WiMAX? Juniper predicts an initial adoption of 1.7m Mobile WiMAX subs by 2007, reaching 21.3m subscribers by 2012.
Maybe it’s all about phones.
Murdoch’s MySpace is Mobilizing with Helio (a virtual cell phone operator). The SK/Earthlink partnership (now called Helio) could be moving from being a “virtual” operator to “real” status — with the help of SK and Earthlink. Murdoch also seems destined to get into MobileTV. It’s just a matter of time.
The AWS auction is for 1,122 licenses in the 1710-1755 MHz and 2110-2155 MHz bands. It’s reportedly the largest-ever sale of wireless licenses and is expected to generate between $8 billion and $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury. The auction is scheduled to start Aug. 9.
DailyWireless has more on AWS Auction: Does it Suck?, AWS Auction Delayed, The AWS & 700MHz Dance and 3G Band Scam?
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