Winners In AWS Auction Buy Breakthroughs And Breathing Time

Sharon Armbrust | September 26, 2006, 03:48 PM

You could say that the winners in the recently concluded AWS auction had their cake and got to eat it, too.

The limited number of big-money bidders at the table, combined with the generous and conveniently parceled license areas and bandwidth allocations on offer, allowed for a leisurely fishing expedition by the country’s major carriers as well as by a cadre of cable operators. No fewer than five of the top 10 winners got licenses covering at least half of the U.S.

T-Mobile and SpectrumCo, the MSO partnership, each got 20 MHz of spectrum covering the whole country (98% and 94% respectively on a net unduplicated pop basis). Verizon picked up 66% coverage and Cingular 61%. And the big winner in terms of expanding its U.S. reach was Leap Wireless, whose Cricket and Denali affiliates (it owns 100% of Cricket and a non-controlling large majority interest in Denali)won licenses with a combined net population of 186 million 2006 pops or 58% of the country.

For the full analysis, visit Kagan Research's Wireless Investor portal at the JupiterKagan web site.