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To: Jon Koplik who wrote (12)9/14/1998 12:07:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn  Read Replies (1) of 2737
 
NextWave Telecom bid $4.3bn for 110 m pops in USA. That was subsequently considered too high. They got about half the spectrum sold, so a lot of other companies considered the same price about right. The C-Block auction later became a bankruptcy shambles.

Australia recently had an auction which got about A$350m. But in these auctions, you need to adjust for how much spectrum is being sold. The bandwidth. So if you look at the auction results, you'll see $/pop/MHz. The prices vary enormously, predominantly as a function of per capita income and population density in the area. Cities such as Mexico City get several orders of magnitude higher $/pop.spectrum than outback Australia. And New York higher than Mexico City.

Spectrum is worth what is bid on the day! A bit like shares.

New Zealand will sell 600 MHz, which is big heaps! We can each have our very own MHz. So the price might be very low.

George Gilder thinks spectrum should decline in price to low values due to improved technology. Spectrum mostly sits underused. A bit like a sea lane. His idea is put a transponder on each 'photon' ship and any ship can go anywhere on the ocean as long as they give way to the right or something. Rather than allocate a whole lane, half a mile wide, to one ship.

So what is spectrum worth? Somewhere between zero and $43 per pop at present. For about 5MHz, though I can't recall what the C-block bandwidth was. Maybe it was 10MHz chunks. Maybe only 2.5MHz. Not very accurate.

Too lazy to go look!

Maurice
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