December 29, 2014
The need for ensuring excellent LTE services for their customers, made the biggest carriers from the United States, Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T, to pay a lot of money in auctions to ensure that they go further with their technology in optimum conditions. After just a month of biding, the three mentioned above alongside other smaller companies paid a total of 44.5 billion dollars for all important network airways! A huge sum with is almost equivalent with the loss suffered by the three giants alongside Sprint in November and twice bigger as maximum predicted before.
Verizon and AT&T need to increase
The money spent seems incredible if we think that apparently these giants have enough spectrum as this moment. The truth is that they don’t. At least they don’t according to the growing expectations of the customer market. All of them have now 4G LTE coverage and Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile have more than 300 million POPs but this still doesn’t mean that the services offered are even close to perfection. So this is why I think it is a good idea to speak a bit about each ones situation to see things clearer.
2.76 billion dollar auction
T-Mobile, for instance, needs a certain block of the AWS spectrum that it currently doesn't have, which spans about one-third of the country. The carrier has a significant amount of 700 MHz spectrum it's currently rolling out, and some analysts think that since T-Mobile only raised 1 billion dollars for the AWS-3 auction, it may have only spent 2 billion dollars in the bidding. Not a bib bid to sum up, like, Verizon and AT&T giants. For example, a provisional bid for a spectrum block in New York City and Long Island went for 2.76 billion dollars alone, which means more than T-Mobile was willing to spend.
Sprint skiped the auction this time
All in all, we didn’t say nothing about the other big cell phone service carrier from the United States of America, Sprint. Already, it rolls out an own 2.5 GHz network and doesn’t necessary need AWS-3 spectrum, so less money to spent though! Still, they have to spare some for the following year, 2015, when it is expected a combined bid of 10 billion dollars for 600 MHz auction from Sprint and T-Mobile.