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Last month, the Canadian Government opened up to public questions on their proposed auction rules. Convenient for us Auction watchers, the questions were also made public, giving us a sneak peak into who is bidding and who is seriously interested. The questions ranged from highly technical and specific, to the pithy one sentence from Bear Sterns “Is there a 700 MHz auction coming in Canada similar to the U.S.?”, to the, are you sure you are in the right room, from Gamco ‘Investment Group’ “Why is their a limit to the amount of spectrum available? At a certain point do the airwaves just become more crowded? The US has 10X the population in a smaller land mass, therefore , shouldn’t we be able to have almost unlimited spectrum or at least 10X more per person than in the US?” (good luck with that one Industry Canada).

You can view the whole list of submissions here (it’s not as long as you might think).

But using, our own proprietary and highly scientific algorithm (we counted the total number of kilobytes of pdfs submitted by each participant), Wireless North has come up with the following table to determine who’s really serious about spectrum in Canada:

 
Annnnd, just for fun, we also give you what it would cost each of the incumbents to UPLOAD their submissions at the worst case scenario of each of their own publicly advertised data rates. Rogers $50/MB, Bell $12/MB, Telus $8MB

 
The real dark horses to watch however in the set-aside spectrum? Look Communications, and one Mystery Bidder represented by law firm Ogilvy Renault.