It was a busy day for the Federal Communications Commission’s auction 96, with the H-Block bids now totaling more than $456 million after the three rounds of bidding held Monday.
At this point, 117 licenses have received bids, with 59 remaining FCC-held.
The license for the New York City economic area continues to be the hottest property, with the new highest bid coming in at $134.6 million. That single New York City EA license, which includes parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Vermont, accounts for more than 25% of the total auction bids so far.
The Los Angeles economic area license has proved to be the second most-expensive, with a current winning bid of $81.8 million. Both the current New York EA and Los Angeles EA top bids came during round 8, with round 12 bidding shifting to slightly smaller metropolitan EAs including Chicago (high bid of $30.9 million), Washington D.C.-Baltimore ($19.9 million high bid), Boston ($16.7 million high bid) and Dallas-Fort Worth ($15.9 million high bid).
The licenses included in Auction 96 include 10 megahertz of spectrum in the upper 1.9 GHz. A total of 23 entities had qualified to participate in the auction process, though none of the nation’s larger wireless carriers are participating. The FCC is not releasing the names of the entities that have placed high bids until the auction process concludes.
H-Block license winners will be required to meet build out requirements of 40% population coverage within four years and 70% coverage within 10 years.
