FCC Auction for 700MHz band closed - maybe

They expected to sell the entire band for 10 billion dollars. When bidding had closed, the D block had not sold for what they expected out of it, but the whole band had sold for a grand total of 19.592 billion.

Blocks A, B, C, and E sold for 3.96, 9.14, 4.75, and 1.27 billion dollars respectively. They aren’t giving up the names of who got what yet though as the auction isn’t completely closed and they still aren’t sure what they’re going to do with the D-Block.

There’s a possibility they’ll just let it go and sell it for whatever it did manage to fetch at auction, but there seems to be a strong possibility that they’ll re-list it separately and sell it on its own, possibly with a lower reserve price. It is however believed that Verizon/Vodafone were the ones to score the coveted C-Block which came with the open access provisions, which Verizon has already shown its intent to make a move towards.

[via PhoneMag]