The FCC just released a list of 168 qualified bidders for the AWS spectrum auction coming up on August 9th, and also announced that the process will not involve the controversial blind bidding. We’ve been following the companies interested in bidding pretty closely, and there were a few surprises in the FCC filings, including a group tied to Rupert Murdoch, DirecTV and Echostar, which put down almost a billion dollars that it can use to bid on spectrum.
Wireless DBS, the consortium tied to Echostar, DirecTV, News Corp, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Echostar’s Charles Ergen, qualified to bid and paid one of the largest upfront payments out of the list of interested bidders, of $972.55 million. The group’s auction plans might involve WiMAX, and prove to be crucial to these companies future as triple play becomes common place. (The upfront payment is refundable if the company doesn’t win the specturm it desires, but could be an indicator of how much the companies are willing to spend.)
The cable consortium SpectrumCo, tied to cable companies Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner Cable and Comcast CEO and Chairman Brian Roberts, among others, qualified to bid and put down another large upfront payment of $637.71 million. Other cable groups like the Washington Post’s Cable One qualified and paid an upfront payment of $3.5 million. The Dolan Family, tied to Charles Dolan, Cablevision’s Chairman, qualified and paid an upfront fee of $149.98 million.
Most of the largest U.S. phone companies qualified. T-Mobile paid an upfront fee of $583.52 million, Cingular put down $500 million, and a company tied to Verizon paid an upfront fee of $383.34 million.
The company tied to Paul Allen, Bend Cable Communications, that we previously profiled, qualified to bid, and paid an upfront fee of $176,000. At least four companies backed by spectrum speculator “Super Mario” Gabelli qualified to bid, paid a total of $3 million in upfront payments. Controversial wireless bidder Allen Salmasi and Nextwave Telecom, qualified to bid through a company called AWS Wireless, and that group put down $142.83 million.
The group called POP Wireless, backed by BPL company Current Communications, which is funded by Google and Earthlink, that we profiled earlier, was listed as “not qualified to bid.” We’ll follow up with more on the upcoming auction before the big day.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on July 29th, 2006 with no comments.
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The bandwidth speed battles between Cablevision and Verizon are getting bloodier. Cablevision has been pushing the envelope and is forcing Verizon to do things a Bell typically doesn’t like to do - offer real broadband level speeds.
Verizon has announced that it will sell a 50 megabits down and 10 5 megabits up connection for $90 a month. (Thanks Tom, for pointing out that the business offer was 50/10.) The service is available where Verizon FiOS network is live in the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
This is an interesting move -does this mean Verizon is now just a pipe provider (and there is nothing wrong with that.) I have argued this is the best recourse for the phone companies is to sell more bandwidth at premium prices - turn the Moore’s law to their advantage.
Written by Om Malik on July 18th, 2006 with no comments.
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In his post Is ESPN committing reverse Net Neutrality, ZDNet colleague George Ou looks at the case I've referred to in which ESPN360-delivered streaming video of each World Cup match is available only to subscribers of certain broadband providers- but not to those subscribers who access the Internet through Comcast, Cablevision, AT&T, and [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 21st, 2006 with no comments.
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Cablevision has announced Optimum Voice World Call, a new VoIP calling plan that will let users make 500 minutes of calls to anywhere in the world for a flat rate of $19.95 a month.If I am Skype or Vonage, I am very worried- not only because of the strategy but because of who is executing [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 17th, 2006 with no comments.
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Long Island, N.Y.-based Cablevision said today that it would launch a 60-day test of its RS-DVR (Remote Storage-Digital Video Recorder) in its home market soon. A full, 2.1 million-subscriber system roll-out is expected later this year.RS-DVR will make it possible for subscribers to record programs directly into their set-top box, without the need for a [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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At the same time big telecom broadband service providers such as AT&T (formerly SBC) and BellSouth are making all sorts of noise about charging content creators of rich content extra for network carriage, the cable companies haven't been that vocal.Not by a long shot.Today, cable industry trade paper Multichannel News explores the issue, commonly referred [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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That's digitalMax. No, he's not selling pills via some jive Internet pharmacy (although the way his eyes are popping out makes you wonder).No, digitalMax is Cox Cable's mascot for bundled services that include the Optimum Voice VoIP product. "It's the multivitamin of digital. And a lot easier to swallow," he says.If you don't believe me [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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