Intellectual Property Law

Handy Guide to the 700 MHz Winners by $ Spent

By Cynthia Brumfield

The 700 MHz auctions are over and AT&T and Verizon Wireless emerged as the biggest winners of the prized broadband spectrum. To no one's surprise, Verizon Wireless won the so-called C block licenses, edging out Google for the licenses that are subject to open access requirements.

I've taken a quick look at the winners (license-by-license list here), aggregated the combined amounts spent and produced a table (after the jump) that sorts the winners from highest (Verizon Wireless at $9.4 billtion) to the smallest (AST Telecom in American Samoa at $20,000).

A few interesting quick points, aside from the obvious big dollar spends by AT&T and Verizon:

--Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures ranked 10th in terms of total dollars spent, with the Microsoft co-founder's company bidding around $113 million for licenses in Portland, Salem (WA/OR) and Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton, WA.

--Despite the fact that the top cable operators Comcast and Time Warner Cable weren't bidders in this auction, cable companies won more than $400 million in bids. In addition to Vulcan (which also control cable operator Charter Communications), Cox ($304.6 million), Bend Cable ($6.7 million), Bresnan Communications ($3.9 million) and Cable Montana ($1.8 million) were among the cable-related winners.

--Someone, an individual named David Miller, bid nearly $8 million for 16 licenses in mostly small markets such as Johnstown, Pa, Briscoe, TX and Jaspar, GA. Who is this guy? A Google search produced no useful information.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on March 20, 2008 (boomark / email).