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

To: Zorro who wrote (10055)	1/19/1999 9:01:00 AM
From: Steven Bowen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12468

Hi Zorro, <There is a very simple reason for the apparent lack of competition between WNP and NextBand in the LMDS auction.> I don't think your simple answer flies. (BTW, I had up front payments for WNP and Nextband of $100M and $50M, respectively.) If I recall correctly, the upfront payments only limited what a company could bid on in any one round. For example, if company ABC had an upfront payment of $13M, they could bid on LA in one round and San Francisco in the next, but just couldn't bid on both in one round. During the last month of the auction hardly any bidding was occuring at all. Companies were making junk bids just to stay alive in the auction. Seems like WNP had plenty of unused bidding credit and plenty of time and opportunity to make a play for LA or San Francisco. It still just seems odd to me that these two companies could split the US up and both bid against everyone and anyone in "their" markets, but never bid against each other. Especially in areas like NC, SC, Tenn, Kent where they were bidding in essentially alternating markets, but never head to head. As you say "eligibility just to bid for the A-block license in LA required $13M (which accounted for almost 1/2 of NextBand's bidding credits). WNP, on the other hand, had the muscle to pursue most of the top markets with little or no challenge.". But then why didn't WNP at least challenge for any of the West Coast that they in effect forfeited to Nextband? Could you tell me why a company totally on their own with a national asspiration like WNP had zero interest in LA, San Fransisco, Phoenix, Seattle, etc? From the notes I have here, it looks like Nextband won LA with their bid in round 2. The auction went what, another 70 some rounds and WNP was never interested in raising that bid? Maybe, but I find it very hard to believe. And remember, WNP let Nextband have LA for only like $2.48 per pop, while many other markets, like Wichita, KA went for many times this. Steve