Incentive Auction Rules Likely Hurt Results, O'Rielly Says
FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said rules for the TV incentive auction may have led to a less successful auction. O’Rielly in a speech Thursday in Bogota, Colombia, criticized the decision to enact a spectrum reserve, open to carriers with little…
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low-band spectrum, and to offer the best licenses also to the more spectrum deprived (see 1508060028). When the auction was over, T-Mobile, which benefitted from the reserve, won the most licenses and only AT&T won any among the three other major national carriers (see 1704130056). “Social engineering of auctions has never worked in the U.S. and it certainly didn’t work here,” he said. “Of the two smaller nationwide providers, which these policies were meant to help, one [Sprint] didn’t even participate. And, of the two companies that some claimed could foreclose spectrum opportunities, one [Verizon] never placed a bid and the other [AT&T] won only 23 licenses out of the 2912 offered. In analyzing the auction data, it appears that the provider who did win licenses was actually trying to get out of the auction altogether.” O’Rielly spoke at the Latin America Spectrum Management Conference and his remarks were posted by the FCC.