Spectrum Auction: Round 182 and all but done

July 3rd, 2008Spectrum Auction: Round 182 and all but done

Bidding has slowed to trickle in Canada’s AWS spectrum auction with fewer than a dozen bids per round today. What you see here is close to the final picture on the bidding action. It’s clear that Rogers brought the largest wallet to the party, though Telus and Bell also have added to

The only question left for industry Canada is what to do with their 4.2B windfall. $4.2 is quite a bit of cash to find unexpectedly in one’s back pocket, and, more than twice the amount the auction was expected to go for. Funding a national wired and wireless broadband plan would sound to us like at least one good place to start.

Spectrum auction 182

Coming up on WirelessNorth.ca, more detail on the winners and losers of this auction by geography and spectrum band and what it means for the future of the wireless industry in Canada. Stay tuned…

Christian

Quick question for you - not sure that you have the answer though (I don't :-) ):

If Globalive's believed wireless financing mostly comes from Egyptian and Icelandic nationals http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2008/07/04/tech-s..., and Industry Canada - for whatever reason - decides that it doesn't comply with Canada's law on foreign ownership, would the auction be null and void and the process re-started? Remember here that Globalive was betting like a bovine with mad cow disease at the beginning on anything and everything that had "MHz" next to it and had a big part in driving the prices where they are at...
Christian

This was always something that bothered me. They were planning on reviewing foreign ownership - this was part of their schedule back in March when they were revising from the list of bidders to the list of qualified bidders. They did get the beneficial ownership and letters of credit, but did not get to the level of validating foreign ownership levels - not sure why, they just essentially said "er, now we will do this after the auction...". I'm guessing they just ran out of time. Seems like a potential problem if one of the bidders goes and does something really silly like breaks the auction rules and is sitting on a number of winning bids.

I can't find anything in the auction framework that gets into this, so it's hard to speculate on the consequences yet. And you really can't get much out of Globalive's statements of beneficial ownership (http://www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/smt-gst.nsf/en/sf...), so we will have to see...

And yes, this is another Christian, not someone talking to themselves. ;)
WirelessGuy

Look for a TELUS/Bell joint announcement in the future. :-)
Simon

There is simply no evidence that Rogers will deploy CDMA in conjunction with its GSM technology. If Canada decides to phase out CDMA, it's going to be a long and intensive process.

As for Bell and Telus going to build a GSM overlay, we'll see.
midtoad

I hear that Rogers will use its new spectrum to launch a national CDMA network to better compete with Bell and Telus... not!
sid

Any "extra" money the government gets, it has to all go to pay down the debt. The interest savings from paying down that debt can be used for whatever.
Christian

looking forward to your analysis / insights

Wirelessnorth.ca

July 3rd, 2008Spectrum Auction: Round 182 and all but done

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