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.
(Washington, DC) The idea that broadband carriers might discriminate in favor of a particular service or application is generally considered to be a bad notion, but some experts say broadband carrier discrimination might actually help innovation. Speaking at the Internet Video Policy Symposium yesterday former FCC Chief Economist and current George Mason University professor Tom Hazlett pointed to Google's 2003 deal with AOL, a pact premised on carrier discrimination, as one key factor leading to the search engine's meteoric rise.
AOL's deal to give Google exclusive search engine rights on its service was "the break of its life," Hazlett said. At the time AOL was the dominant Internet access provider in the U.S. and "Google paid for that, they paid an ISP for that."
"That was a highly discriminatory action" that nonetheless spurred Google, and the Internet, to great heights.
Simon Wilkie, another former FCC Chief Economist and currently a professor at USC, took a more nuanced approach. Discriminatory against a service or application in favor of another service or application is "OK so long as you don't block it."
FTC economist Patrick DeGraba said that a particular form of arguable discrimination, traffic shaping, doesn't rise to a level of anticompetitive concern unless the broadband carriers are deemed to have market power. "If there is market power, then the kind of traffic management becomes an issue."
But Cowen & Co. Chief Technology Strategist was more blunt. "I have a hard time believing that [carrier discrimination] would be in the best interests of consumers."
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:17 PM | Print | Comments (0)(Washington, DC) The preparation for the nation's big impending transition to digital television is going as smoothly as possible even if some scenarios suggest that the government may run out of funds for DTV converter boxes, Acting NTIA Administrator Meredith Baxter said yesterday. Speaking here at the Internet Video Policy Symposium, Baker said that her agency has approved eight million of the $40 coupons, or around $320 of 
the total $890 million authorized. The boxes are designed to help analog-only TV customers dodge blank TV screens on February 18, 2009, the day after TV stations stop transmitting in analog format.
"By some estimates, we'll run out of money in August," she told the attendees. By other estimates, the funding will last through August and by still other estimates the funding will last all the way through the transition. Complicating the projections are the big spikes of coupon requests, starting with the first week the coupons became available.
Baker said that her group would probably go ahead and ask Congress for an additional $450 million to fund the box program to ensure that the well doesn't run dry. She also said that the NTIA is "working hard, particularly with the vulnerable communities" such as elderly people and rural areas to make sure that word of the transition reaches the right people.
Her big concern is "waste, fraud and abuse" of the coupon cards, red credit card size cards that can be applied at thousands of retailers toward the purchase of DTV converter boxes. "We had our first coupons on eBay," she said, adding that the online exchange giant immediately notified the NTIA of the illegal sale of the card.
In terms of complaints by low power TV stations that the DTV boxes won't allow viewers to receive their signals (which won't convert to digital transmission by the transition deadline), Baker said plenty of the DTV box models on the market allow for passthrough of analog signals. "We have six boxes that have a passthrough feature and I can tell that a whole bunch more are on the way."
Baker also said that two big issues the next Administration will have to tackle are broadband availability and Internet content regulation. "It's imperative that broadband becomes universally available," she said. Although she doesn't endorse the idea of government involvement in content, Baker said that issues such as indecency on the Internet will only likely grow larger. "I think content regulation will be a big issue going forward."
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:30 PM | Print | Comments (2)(Washington, DC) The State Department's top official in charge of International Communications and Information Policy, Ambassador David Gross, said yesterday that despite poor rankings in OECD broadband usage data, the U.S. is still ahead of the curve in high-speed Internet infrastructure. Speaking at the Internet Video Policy Symposium, Ambassador Gross said that the Internet and broadband services are strong in the U.S. even if, according to some measures, other nations have faster offerings and higher take-rates.
"The simple answer is that we're not behind [other nations]. We're still ahead," he said. But it's wrong to view broadband service availability and penetration as a contest among nations.
"There is a sense that broadband is a race...that there is a winner and loser," Gross said. "That is not the case."
The U.S. government would like to see all nations come up to speed on broadband service. "We'd like to see everyone, globally, have access to broadband."
He also said it's a mistake to judge other nations' efforts to censor the Internet by U.S. standards. "I'm as strong a First Amendment proponent as there is," Gross said. "But we don't want every country in the world to be just like us.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:52 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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