June 3rd, 2008Spectrum Auction: Round 20 sails past 2.5B
Like a really expensive game of chicken, the spectrum auction goes crashes on again today. Up to 2.5B after round 20 and adding another 125M per round at this rate, which is a lot, when you think about it, for the right to push a few squiggly and invisible waves through a narrow swath of perfectly thin air.
Some names like Jaguar and Bragg are showing some signs of flagging. Having sat out the last 4 rounds, Jaguar has just one more waiver to spend or they’ll be out in the next round. Meanwhile most of new entrant spectrum is split by Quebecor, Globalive, Data AV and Shaw while Telus continues to hold the largest number of high bids (68) amongst the incumbents followed by Bell (42) and Rogers (19). In raw dollars however, Rogers is way out in from with a whopping 800M in high bids this round concentrated across only 19 licences. Rogers is clearly sticking with their strategy of bidding for fewer but higher value licences in major urban centers.
The biggest slugfest is for the licences covering Toronto and/or southern Ontario in each of the 6 (abcdef) spectrum blocks. As these licenses change hands each round (remember the crazy chart?) it’s causing some wild swings in the auction leaderboard, with these individual Toronto licences bid as high as 314Million.
By the way, just a wee bit further north, you could still get 10MHz covering all of the Yukon, the NWT and Nunavut for a mere $20,000…
Telus and Bell’s strategy makes us wonder. By buying up such a wide area footprint, could they be paving the way to roll out a parallel 3.5 HSPA network as a way to switch horses to GSM? Or, as some of the winners of the recent 700Mhz auction in US, would they (and/or Rogers too) be planning to sit on the spectrum until a bigger shift to 4G LTE networks sometime in 2010-2012.
The industry Canada rules do require licence holders to roll out some services using the spectrum in each licence are within 5 years or holders do risk losing them.
Link: Official auction page
Link: Everything you needed to know about the Canadian Spectrum Auction but were afraid to ask
