Sold to the dorky man with emo glasses…

You can stop chewing your fingernails now. The need for nervous pacing, awkward askew glances, anxious hand wringing, and stressful silence is over. Take a deep breath. Now let it out. The 700 MHz auction has officially ended.

Naturally some of you were able to relax a bit when you noticed the reserve price for the C block of the spectrum was met on January 31st. Meeting that reserved price meant that the winner was going to have to abide by the open access rules associated with the block. This is generally seen as a big win for wireless communication customers. The alternative could have been that no one was willing to bid the block with rules that forced them to not so brutally screw over their customers…. In which case the open access clauses would have most likely been stripped from the block and it would have been re-auctioned off at a later date. But that didn’t happen, at least with the C block.

The D block is another story. That was the other big chunk of spectrum that was being sold off. Its reserve price was not met….so now the FCC has to figure out what to do with it. The winners of the D block were supposed to use part of the spectrum to build a special wireless network for first responders. Basically the winners had to foot the bill for building and maintaining the next generation of first responders communication. I guess no large cooperation found that to be very tantalizing.

As of right now we have no idea who won what. All the bidding was done under strict secrecy. Most people expect Version to walk away with a big chunk of new spectrum. The FCC has announced that the winners will be made public within 10 days. Overall the auction is being viewed as a big success. The FCC had hoped they would have been able to raise 10-15 billion dollars via auctioning off the old spectrum….it turns out they actually raised a bit over 19 billion.

So now we just have to wait and see who the winners were. The last bit of intrigue the auction has to offer is whether or not Google’s names will be on the list of winners. Personally I don’t think it will be, but there is always a chance…