FCC Cashes In on Spectrum Auction

Posted on Mar 19, 2008

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FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin oversaw the FCC’s most profitable auction ever, with total revenue falling only $5 billion short of the Energy Department’s annual budget.

After two months and 261 rounds of bidding, the FCC announced Tuesday that it has raised a total of $19.6 billion from the sale of the U.S. wireless spectrum. The revenue, slated to fund “public safety and digital television transition initiatives,” is nearly double what Congress had previously estimated for the publicly owned spectrum.

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Agence France-Presse via Yahoo:

The US government has announced it has raised a record 19.6 billion dollars in an auction as bidders sought a prime segment of the US wireless spectrum.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Kevin Martin said in a statement late on Tuesday that the 700 MHz auction that began on January 24 had closed Tuesday after 261 rounds of bidding.

Martin did not identify the companies which had bid for the licenses for the 1,099 frequencies in the 700 MHz spectrum being abandoned as television broadcasters complete a federally-mandated switchover from analog to digital by early next year.

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