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As I talked about on Prepaid Reviews on Friday, the winners of the 700 MHz auction were revealed. As expected, Verizon and AT&T absolutely dominated. They were responsible for roughly $16 billion of the $19 billion bid in the auction. The rest went to the smaller players, including some satellite TV companies looking to take their signal to a mobile platform. Alltel, the nation’s fifth largest cell carrier, was shut out of the bidding, as was prepaid carrier Leap Wireless. Another prepaid provider, MetroPCS, picked up one lonely license. So who else won?
It appears, actually, that Verizon didn’t win all of the C-Block. No, AT&T wouldn’t let that happen, as they put up $1.6 billion to take the Mississippy Valley region of the spectrum. I’m not sure what that means, or if Verizon even really cares. They surely got their $9 billion worth.
Qualcomm picked up some E-Block to beef up their MediaFLO offering. Not sure exactly how that’s going to help, but I’ll defer to Qualcomm’s judgment. Cable companies Cox and Cablevision, as well as satellite provider EchoStar, got some licenses in the A-Block. Mobile TV ahoy! Not that I’m really interested in that. Are you?
Unexpectedly, oil company Chevron racked up a decent portion of spectrum across the North and Midwest. What do they plan to do with it? Your guess is as good as mine. Oil. Radio spectrum. Oil. Radio spectrum. Nope, nothing coming to me yet. Maybe if I try some other sort of association…
I’m sure we’ll read plenty more about the winners and losers of this in the coming days. I wonder if there was anything stranger than Chevron winning spectrum.
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