OXFORD, United Kingdom-In an effort to revive broadband wireless services in the United Kingdom, the government has outlined plans for an auction of the 3.4 GHz band that will carry the service. This move follows extensive industry consultation in April in an attempt to avoid the earlier debacle when many licenses failed to gain any bidders.
The auction, which is set to start this October, will offer 15 regional licenses across the United Kingdom with one license per region. As against the previous attempt, successful bidders will be able to make staged payments for licenses with no rollout obligations, and proposed service restrictions on licensees will be removed.
Separately, the designer of the lucrative U.K. third-generation (3G) spectrum auction of two years ago has criticized mobile-phone company executives for complaining that they paid too much and dismissed calls for the consumer to foot the bill. Ken Binmore said cell-phone operators had grown used to being handed out spectrum for peanuts in government beauty contests. “But why should the British taxpayer subsidize telecom shareholders by selling them spectrum below its market price?” he said. “These executives want to be insulated from risk. But taking risks is what being an entrepreneur is all about .It is because an entrepreneur risks losing their capital when making an investment that the rest of us are not entitled to tax away all their profits when things turn out well.”
