The FCC’s AWS auction is over and now it’s time for the fun to begin. The Washington Post’s Frank Ahrens has this article on the auction’s outcome in which old-Washington-hand-turned-analyst Blair Levin predicts that consumers will see new services based on the awarded spectrum within 18 months.
“There’s no bad news for the consumer in this auction,” said telecommunications analyst Blair Levin at Legg Mason. “At a minimum, it will increase the efficiency and improve the quality of the networks.” Levin said he thought consumers might experience the benefits of the FCC auction within a year and a half.
As the article points out, the most interesting winners are the cable companies, which, collectively through their SpectrumCo venture, spent $2.4 billion on the licenses. Richard Greenfield from Pali Capital sent out a research note this morning with the following estimates on how much each cable company spent in the bidding.
| SpectrumCo Partners Auction Wins | ||
| Company | Share | Dollar Amount |
| Comcast | 52% | $1.25 billion |
| Time Warner | 29% | $700 million |
| Cox | 10% | $240 million |
| Brighthouse Networks | 4% | $100 million |
| Sprint/Nextel | 5% | $120 million |
| Source: Pali Capital | ||
With the drama of the bids now over, Greenfield has a host of questions for the cable operators, including what, exactly, do the companies plan to do with the spectrum.
How do they see wireless evolving within the cable bundle? So far the biggest “buzz” around the Sprint joint venture has been the ability to program your DVR from a Sprint cellphone, which seems quite a bit secondary to programming your DVR from an Internet connection (which cannot even be done today, without a third-party Slingbox).
Although I said yesterday that we might start getting answers to these and other questions as cable chieftains take the podium at some high-profile investor conferences this week, Greenfield points out that they are still under a gag order under the auction’s quiet rules until they send in their final down payment checks, which should be about another ten days.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:41 AM|Comments(0)
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