spectrum

Today, it's 04-04, which means happy "faux" birthday to us. We don't have any guests on the show, so it's just us hanging out. A good time, today feels like a classic episode.

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Verizon executives on Friday said that a valuable chunk of newly purchased analog TV spectrum is a "transformative opportunity" that will let the company offer vastly faster wireless broadband service within the next three years.

In a conference call with investors on Friday morning, Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam opened up about their plans for 700Mhz spectrum obtained through a recently concluded Federal Communications Commission auction. Early word of the plans began trickling out Thursday night after a gag rule of sorts lifted.

"With the 700MHz C block, we're in … Read more

Companies bidding in the Federal Communications Commission's 700MHz spectrum auction are starting to talk.

The gag order that silenced those participating in the FCC's auction that ended last month was lifted late Thursday. Now companies are free to discuss their plans and strategies for bidding in the auction.

Verizon Wireless plans to use its newly won wireless spectrum licenses in the 700MHz auction to deliver 4G services, CTO Tony Melone told the wireless news site Unstrung.

Verizon Wireless paid nearly $10 billion for licenses in the C block, which are subject to a special FCC rule that requires … Read more

Google says it participated in the recent wireless spectrum auction not with the goal to win, but to help drive bidding high enough to ensure that open-access rules it had pushed for would be adopted.

"Google's top priority heading into the auction was to make sure that bidding on the so-called 'C Block' reached the $4.6 billion reserve price that would trigger the important 'open applications' and 'open handsets' license conditions," Richard Whitt, Washington telecom and media counsel, and Joseph Faber, corporate counsel, wrote in a posting Thursday on Google's Public Policy Blog.

"We … Read more

Google on Monday said it has a plan to have American consumers from Manhattan to rural North Dakota surfing the Web on handheld gadgets at gigabits-per-second speeds by the 2009 holiday season.

The company, joined by other heavyweights like Microsoft and Dell, has long been lobbying for the Federal Communications Commission to free up unused broadcast TV channels known as "white spaces" for unlicensed use by personal devices. That portion of the TV band is highly prized because it can propagate long distances and through obstacles.

It also possesses the bandwidth to support vastly faster data rates than … Read more

Google is planning a conference call with journalists on Monday to discuss a company filing with the FCC regarding the use of unused portions of the TV spectrum band, known as white spaces.

On the 11:30 a.m. EST call will be Rick Whitt, Google's Washington telecom and media counsel.

Technology companies want to be able to use the spectrum between the TV channels for Internet access, and the FCC is considering opening up the white spaces for use by unlicensed Internet devices. But broadcasters oppose the move, saying it will cause interference.

The FCC has been running tests … Read more

Could satellite TV provider Dish Network be planning to build a mobile TV service with its newly won 700Mhz spectrum?

That's the question that many analysts were asking after it was disclosed this week that the company, also known as EchoStar Communications, spent $711 million for a block of licenses in the auction that is ideal for offering mobile broadcast TV, according to a Reuters story.

The much-talked about auction ended Tuesday raising about $19.6 billion for the government. Wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon Wireless won the bulk of the spectrum.

The licenses that Dish bought … Read more

Consumer watchdog groups and some lawmakers want to know why the block of spectrum reserved for public safety in the Federal Communications Commission's 700 MHz auction didn't hit its reserve price.

On Wednesday, a coalition of nine consumer advocacy groups, including the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and the Media Access Project, sent a letter to the chairman of the FCC asking the agency to investigate whether the public safety requirements for "d" block license were too stringent. The groups also want the FCC to study whether plans for the shared public-private network are even … Read more

The FCC's 700MHz spectrum auction is over and Verizon won. But so did Google, which made a bid that wasn't chosen.

There's a good chance that Google didn't even want to win, as my colleague Maggie Reardon suspected last year. It didn't make any sense for Google to get into the telecom business.

Why would Google bid if it didn't intend to win? By bluffing its way through the bid, Google was able to drive the price high enough to get the FCC to adopt open-access rules it pushed for that require the network … Read more