Who's in on the 700MHz auction?

Feel free to shout it out in the comments, we know y'all are gunning for a piece. What's that? Don't quite have enough change in the couch to hit the $4.6 billion minimum bid on the 700MHz C block? How lame. Lucky for us, there are quite a few companies out there that do have that kind of cash earmarked for this and other highly desirable parts of the spectrum, which should make for some exciting bidding. Too bad FCC's auction process, which begins on January 24th, is totally blind, and with the exception of the few companies that have publicly stated their intentions to bid, we won't know much about how the auction went down until February or March. The following, however, are confirmed:

• AT&T; T-Mobile says it already has plenty.
• Cox Communications; Time Warner and Comcast aren't biting.
• Frontline; gunning for the D block.
• Google; might just do the minimum to ensure the C block is "open."
• Verizon; Sprint is busy with WiMAX.

Sounds like slim pickings, but there a bunch of wild cards out there, including satellite providers, smaller wireless carriers and even big box retailers.

[Via paidContent.org]

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 5th 2007 4:34PM]

Your semi-colon use is very confusing. Please revise. Use "while", "and" and "though"
Verizon isn't bidding and is busy with WIMAX like Sprint? AT&T isn't bidding for the same reasons as T-Mobile? I thought Verizon was bidding and was focusing on LTE and AT&T isn't since it has 700mhz spectrum or will bid very little.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 5th 2007 7:47PM]

I totally agree. A little confusing, to say the least.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 7th 2007 10:01AM]

does that mean we're going to need new hardware in order to take advantage of this new band?