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Technology Stocks : CellularVision (CVUS): 2-way LMDS wireless cable. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steven Bowen who wrote (1084)	2/10/1998 1:45:00 PM
From: WTC	Respond to of 2063

Re: <All the best estimates I've seen indicate that people still believe the auction will take in $4B. > Well, put me down on the list of auction observers who now expect the auction will bring a small fraction of $4B. The big name, deep pocket participants seem to be following very conservative, very selective tactical plans for augmenting current capabilities, not for developing new national network capabilities. Even the top five or so participants, gauged by up-front payment level, don't seem to have come to the party with the wherewithal to forge a new national access network, with bidding driven upward by competing grand strategies. I just don't think we will see a convergence of "I NEED that license" attitudes that has to occur to drive license prices up. After all, the participants are bidding with real money, not playing some board game. (Even with a 45% discount, it's real money!) The very interesting, still open question in my mind is just what is the depth of bidding resource, i.e., the internal governance limit, that WNP, Nextband, or BCK/RIVGAM bring to the auction. Just because it's Craig McCaw, or if it had been MSFT/Gates, doesn't mean there is a blank check for this license hunt. I expect we will need to see a few rounds of bidding before anything like a clear picture begins to form as to the bidders' auction objectives -- geographic clustering, A vs. A&B, etc. And there is the strong possibility that for 90+% of BTAs, there may not be much bidding activity at all past the first few rounds. Perhaps we ought not forget that McCaw has a history of entering FCC bidding apparently just to drive prices up, without any obvious interest in actually securing licenses. That could be a bidding tactic that buys a lot of unwanted licenses this time out!