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Technology Stocks : Winstar Comm. (WCII) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steven Bowen who wrote (4018)	2/26/1998 11:56:00 AM
From: SteveG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12468

<..This still can't explain the auction. There probably isn't a better line of site, no foliage, dryer, highly populated city in the country than LA...> You are right, it's not consistent. I was trying to tease out any rough bias. It's likely as you say, a 5 stone game of Go. <..And it's getting no action at all. And what a mass of densely populated, educated, high tech people you have in San Francisco who would love the high bandwidth...> Are you sure rain is completely negligible or compensatable? I'm STILL hoping to hear details about service performance / customer satisfaction in rainy climes. <..Nobody is challenging McCaw at all on the whole West Coast. Seems to suspicious to me....> Is it possible that this auction could have the taint of orchestrated or implicit collusion?

To: Steven Bowen who wrote (4018)	2/26/1998 2:43:00 PM
From: Bernard Levy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12468

The shocking aspect of the lack of bidding for the SF license is that this license includes the entire Bay Area (SF, Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose). The population of engineers and programmers who have an absolute need for broadband services in this area is very large. Why isn't there more interest? ATHM is headquartered in Redwood City, but it should not make any difference. In fact some of the economic studies concerning LMDS roll-out were based on data compiled in this area. I think Las Vegas may be a special situation. In addition to data services to the Las Vegas hotels, an LMDS license in Vegas could be used to offer video on demand (or quasi-demand) for hotel guests. This is probably one of the few locations where video on demand might work right now. Otherwise, the auction looks extremely weird. Hopefully it will all make sense once the auction finishes and the bidders declare their intentions.