Google Confirms FCC Frequency Auction Bid
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Richard Baguley Published on November 30, 2007 Comment on this |
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30th Nov 07 – Google wants to own the airwaves: the search giant has just announced that they are going to bid for a chunk of the frequency spectrum that's being auctioned off by the FCC on January 24th. Google has previously indicated that they will be bidding in the auction for what is considered to be "prime" real estate in the wireless world. The 700Mhz spectrum is being vacated by television stations that have been mandated to move to an all digital format. This is the latest in a series of major moves in wireless, Google recently announced that they will be developing an open operating system for cell phones.The announcement was made this morning in a press release from Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that “"We believe it's important to put our money where our principles are...Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today's wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet." This was underlined by Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google, who will head up the bidding process, who claimed in a blog post that “this auction provides an unprecedented opportunity to bring the riches of the Net to more people.”
This news is not a huge surprise; Google has long been rumored to be considering such a bid, as they were behind much of the lobbying that lead to the FCC imposing an open access condition on a large chunk of the spectrum. Under the rules imposed by the FCC, one of the frequency bands that is being auctioned off will have an open access condition imposed on it, so the winning bidder (if certain bidding conditions are met) will have to allow any device to connect to a network they built using this frequency. There are no such conditions on the frequency bands that existing cell phone and mobile data networks use: the carriers can restrict access as much as they want, only allowing the cell phones and devices they sell to access their networks. Rules also require users to be able to use any software they wish on the network.
This may be purely a tactical bid as the FCC has set a rule that the frequency band with the open access condition has to attract at least a $4.6 billion bid, or the open access condition would be dropped. Google didn't reveal the details of their bidding strategy, but they may come in with a minimum bid that hits this, but not bid higher. This would mean that the frequency band would keep the open access condition, even if nobody else bids on it. So, talk of a Google mobile data network may be premature; they may be acting purely to ensure that the open access condition stays.
And we don't expect to hear much from the potential bidders on their strategies: the FCC has imposed strict rules about what they can and can't say to stop the bidders from colluding to keep the auction price down. All of the bidders have to register with the FCC by the 3rd of December, so we'll know the full list of potential bidders by then.
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