Doubts Rising About Carrier Participation in Incentive Auction, Moffett Says
Doubts about whether smaller carriers will compete in the TV incentive auction are on the rise at precisely the same time that expectations for what the larger players might actually spend are falling, analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson told us…
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in an email. Questions emerged at last week’s Competitive Carriers Association conference over whether small carriers will jump in in a big way during the auction, slated to start March 29 (see 1510090022). “We’re still a long ways out from March, but I think it is fair to say that skepticism seems to be mounting about just how much the auction might raise,” Moffett said. “Sprint’s decision not to participate, coupled with cautious comments from Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, have led equity investors to lower their sights a little bit. All this may be posturing, but there are reasons to think that large carriers may be more restrained" than they were in the AWS-3 auction. The small license sizes for sale in the incentive auction “allow regional and rural carriers to focus their very limited resources on acquiring low-band spectrum that better fits their service areas,” countered Michael Calabrese, director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project. “As a result, selling other spectrum in secondary markets to raise funds to participate in the incentive auction is a strategy some non-national carriers can use to right-size their spectrum holdings and get more bang for the buck.”