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700MHz auction comes to a $19.6B finish, winners still not revealed

by Nilay Patel posted Mar 18th 2008 at 5:34PM


Hear that? Yeah, that's the fat lady -- the 700MHz auction is over today, and the FCC netted $19.6B for the 1,099 licenses it put on the block. It's still not known who placed the winning $4.75B bid for the lucrative open-access 50-state C-block (probably Verizon) but hopefully we'll find out soon. There was a ton of regional action as well: a package of licenses for spectrum in Chicago went for $892.4M, another set for Newark and NYC went for $884.7M, and LA's two sets of 700MHz airwaves cost some lucky punter giant corporation $580.3M and $484M -- and if you'd scraped together $17K, you would be the king of the airwaves in American Samoa. Sadly, no one met the reserve for the public-safety D-block, so it looks like Uncle Sam's going to have to toss it in the back of the van and schlep it the old fashioned way. We doubt we'll know for sure who's got what until the gray suits manage to verify everything and make sure all the rules were followed, but it's still an historic day -- and remember, we've got all the info on what this could mean in the future right here.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Filed under: Misc

Tags: 700mhz, auction, breaking news, BreakingNews, fcc

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