AUCTION NEWS: Bidding slows as third weekend break nears

WASHINGTON—The Sprint Nextel Corp./cable joint venture appears to be achieving a national footprint without the benefit of costly regional licenses.

As of round 46 of the advanced wireless service spectrum auction, the JV had high bids on128 spectrum licenses covering 250 million people, out of a U.S. population of about 300 million. Sprint Nextel and its cable partners had high bids of slightly more than $2 billion for those licenses; comparatively, Verizon Wireless bid nearly $2.8 million for the four regional licenses which it continues to hold. Verizon Wireless’ licenses include 20 megahertz of spectrum in the eastern half of the U.S., covering about 190 million people.

The Federal Communications Commission divided up the U.S. and its territories into 36 of the large Regional Economic Area Grouping licenses, 352 Economic Area licenses and 743 Cellular Market Area licenses.

The Sprint Nextel/cable JV leads the number of high bids among the mid-sized economic areas, with the vast majority of its bids going toward EAs. NextWave Telecom Inc.-backed AWS Wireless Inc. has also been pursuing the EA licenses, while most of T-Mobile USA Inc.’s bids have gone toward a few regional licenses and more than a hundred of the geographically smaller CMA licenses.

T-Mobile USA continues as the auction’s top bidder in terms of dollars, with bids so far totaling nearly $4.2 billion for 130 licenses covering 483 million overlapping pops.

Meanwhile, NextWave has bid on the most licenses: 151, covering a population of about 67.2 million pops. NextWave has so far bid about $98.5 million for spectrum as of round 46.

The auction received 165 bids in the latest round—a significant drop, since the number of bids per round had previously been close to 300. Total bids are at about $13.2 billion, with 125 eligible bidders still in the game. Only 119 out of the 1,122 spectrum licenses have not yet received bids.