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Businesses Wireless Networking AT&T Communications Government Network Networking Television The Almighty Buck United States Verizon News Technology

FCC Says TV Airwaves Being Sold For Wireless Use Are Worth $86.4 Billion (reuters.com) 72

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday the price of 126 MHz of television airwaves taken from broadcasters to be sold for wireless use in an ongoing auction is $86.4 billion. The FCC disclosed the price in a statement after completing the first part of an auction to repurpose low-frequency wireless spectrum relinquished by television broadcasters. The so-called "broadcast incentive" spectrum auction is one of the commission's most complex and ambitious to date. In this round, called a reverse auction, broadcasters competed to give up spectrum to the FCC for the lowest price. In the next stage, the forward auction, wireless and other companies will bid to buy the airwaves for the highest price. If wireless companies are unwilling to pay $86.4 billion, the FCC may have to hold another round of bidding by broadcasters and sell less spectrum than had been expected, analysts said. The Wall Street Journal points out that $86.4 billion is more than the market cap of T-Mobile and Spring combined. It's roughly double the amount raised in the last FCC auction, where ATT spent $18.2 billion and Verizon spent $10.4 billion. It's highly likely we'll see multiple rounds stretching into 2017 that will eventually match the supply with the demand.
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FCC Says TV Airwaves Being Sold For Wireless Use Are Worth $86.4 Billion

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @07:23PM (#52416947)

    Why this is being sold, rather than leased?

    Shouldn't this just be like a 5-15 year lease to the spectrum for whatever amount the companies are willing to bid?

    'Sale' sounds rather permanent, and divvying up a limited resource, like the airwaves even for ridiculous sums of money like 90 billion, seems rather anti-competitive to me.

    • Yeah, they are buying these for all eternity. But I tell you what: instead of recurring lower income, politicians like it better to have bigger sums of money on the table they can decide about.

      • buying these for all eternity

        Sure, just like the broadcast TV companies did before that....except they no longer have that spectrum.

    • ---"'Sale' sounds permanent..."
      I'll bet that's what the TV broadcasters whose channels are gone thought, too.
  • Renting airwaves (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Drew M. ( 5831 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @07:33PM (#52416979) Homepage

    Why are we selling these airwaves? We should be renting them by the month. This prevents the wastefulness and hoarding of resources by a company that never plans to use them. What if some company buys them all up and never uses them in hopes that they double in price in the next 10 years due to scarcity?

    I said nearly the exact same thing as a solution for keeping the IPV4 address space from running out, as most of the space is currently being hoarded by large organizations that don't need full Class A blocks:
    https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]

    • I said nearly the exact same thing as a solution for keeping the IPV4 address space from running out, as most of the space is currently being hoarded by large organizations that don't need full Class A blocks:

      What about ... using ipv6 instead?

    • by schnell ( 163007 )

      We should be renting them by the month.

      Will you be changing cellphones every month when your current provider no longer has the lease to the spectrum band you were using? Phones can only support so many radio band filters without increasing size and cost, so different versions are frequently built with support for only the frequency bands used by specific carriers, especially on low-cost phones. You know that the radios on the cellphone towers don't magically support every frequency as well, right? Would you spend large sums of $$$ to buy equipm

    • Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt...

      Why are we selling these airwaves? We should be renting them by the month.

      The airwaves are only licensed. A contract of only months would be moronic, as it takes YEARS to build out any cellular network, and nobody would make the investment without some guarantees that they can keep using them for quite a few years.

      What if some company buys them all up and never uses them in hopes that they double in price in the next 10 y

    • Why

      hoarding of resources

      That's why....how are grown men so fucking naive?

    • by Blymie ( 231220 )

      Renting them by the month now! That's even worse than buddy's overall lease term above!

      You do realise that this money comes from YOU! You, the person that has cell phone service.

      Where else does the carrier get money to pay for the lease?

      The cost of these airwaves should be ZERO. Not one penny.

      Yes, they should be regulated. Yes, if you don't use them, they get pulled.

      But paying for them? Billions and trillions? THAT COMES FROM YOU IN THE END!

    • Let's see, I've got the use of these airwaves in this area for $100,000,000 this month. I'll just invest $5 billion in hardware so that I can use them. My business plan says I'll break even in 4 years.

      Next month --- What do you mean, the bands I've spent $5.1 billion to use won't be available to me any more?"

  • by randalware ( 720317 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @08:22PM (#52417131) Journal

    Why not ?

    Meshing routers could cover large areas cheaply !

  • I think a lot of people in rural areas got a raw deal from this digital TV signal upgrade, because it makes it impossible to pick up a lot of stations you used to be able to tune in with the old analog system.

    Where we live, for example? We're about a 70 minute drive away from Washington DC (with many people in town commuting to/from the DC area daily for work), yet you can't pick up the DC network stations over the air. (Well, you *might* get 1 or 2 if you aim the right antenna just the right way -- but yo

  • What area does spring cover? Ive never heard of them before. Then again maybe they ment sprint.

    • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      What area does spring cover?

      I hear their coverage is eternal, but there is a very low signal to noise ratio.

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