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My Thoughts...: AT&T, Verizon Dominate Airwaves Auction

The question remains.  I was under the impression that AT&T remain subsidized by our government.  So, who paid the money for AT&T's portion of the airwaves.  Obviously, the cycle continues...

 

AT&T, Verizon Dominate Airwaves Auction

By JOHN DUNBAR – 54 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The two largest cell phone companies dominated bidding in a record-setting government airwaves auction, according to results released Thursday.

AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless combined to account for $16 billion of the $19.6 billion bid in the auction, an Associated Press analysis of Federal Communications Commission data shows. Verizon Wireless bid $9.4 billion and AT&T $6.6 billion.

The results raised concern that the auction failed to attract any significant new competitors to the cellular telephone market to challenge the dominant companies. For example, Google Inc. was not among the winners, meaning the search engine giant will not be entering the wireless business.

One new entrant, Frontier Wireless LLC, owned by direct broadcast satellite television company EchoStar Corp., won nearly enough licenses to create a nationwide footprint. Frontier bid $712 million, according to FCC data.

The spectrum was made available thanks to the nationwide transition to digital broadcasting. The hope is that consumers will benefit from more advanced wireless services such as high-speed Internet access. The money raised will be used to help public safety programs and offset the federal budget deficit.

Despite the dominance in the auction by the major cell providers, the FCC chairman was upbeat about the auction results.

"A bidder other than a nationwide incumbent won a license in every market," Kevin Martin said. As a result, there is the potential for a "wireless third-pipe" competitor to emerge in every market across the nation.

Broadband access is dominated by the major telecommunications and cable companies. Martin wants wireless to emerge as a third platform, creating competition.

But Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, an advocacy group that supports greater access to communications services, said the auction failed in that regard because Verizon Communications Inc. already is a dominant provider of Internet access.

"The prospect of a genuine third pipe competitor in the wireless world is now slim to none," he said.

Until Thursday, the names of the bidders were kept anonymous in an effort to discourage collusion during the auction.

Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and British telecom giant Vodafone Group PLC, won nearly every license in the consumer-friendly "C block."

The frequencies, which encompass about one-third of the spectrum at auction, are subject to "open access" provisions pushed by Martin. That means people on the network that is built can use whatever phones or software they wish.

Google posted a bid for the C block licenses early in the auction, assuring that the open-access provision would be put in place, but the offer was not enough.

Verizon Wireless won enough of the C-block licenses to cover every state but Alaska. The company said it was very pleased with the results, which will allow it to "continue to grow our business and data revenues."

AT&T said it will have "quality spectrum available for new services covering 95 percent of the U.S. population," according to Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive of the company's wireless unit.

The third leading bidder was Qualcomm Inc., which pledged $1.03 billion. Included in that total is $472 million the company pledged toward the block designated for the creation of an emergency communications network. The bid was well under the FCC-required minimum of $1.3 billion, so Qualcomm's winning total comes to $558 million.

The agency agreed to separate this D block from the rest of the auction so the winners could be announced. Not including that block, winning bids totaled $19.1 billion.

Also Thursday, Martin said he had ordered an investigation by the FCC internal watchdog into the circumstances surrounding the failure of the block to attract a winning bid.

Public interest groups asked the agency on Wednesday to investigate allegations about a meeting between Frontline Wireless LLC and its financial backers and a company called Cyren Call, created by Nextel Corp. co-founder Morgan O'Brien.

Frontline was widely expected to bid on the public safety spectrum block. But the company dropped out before the auction began after failing to meet a minimum required payment.

Cyren Call was acting as the agent for a nonprofit public safety trust that would share the network with the winning bidder.

On the Net:

• Federal Communications Commission: http://www.fcc.gov/

The Associated Press: AT&T, Verizon Dominate Airwaves Auction

Obama's `Cheap' Words May Prove Costly to Him: Margaret Carlson

Again, reality has raised its head during an opportune time.  Many critics work hard to minimize the words of a pastor and, at the same time, work to destroy the hopes and dreams of a man to bridge the gaps of the various American cultures.

How soon we forget the atrocities of a country that leverage the free labor of many on its way to rise to power.  How soon we forget the vigorous attempt of many to suppress the progress of cultures to maintain control of its politics, education and economic hold on the world.  How do we forget the Tuskegee Experiment?  How dare anyone speak of the past?

Margaret Carlson's commentary is an excellent article.  It makes for a great start to realizing the thoughts of many. 

 

Note: My thoughts are not an indication of my selection of a candidate for the November General election.

Bloomberg.com: Opinion

March 20 (Bloomberg) -- ``Words are cheap,'' Senator Hillary Clinton said when she first realized that Senator Barack Obama's were anything but. Self-aware enough to know she couldn't beat him on a podium, she decided to turn him into a latter day Elmer Gantry fooling people with sweet talk.

Obama's words this week may be the costliest any presidential candidate has ever uttered. In my time covering politics, I've never heard a candidate speak so honestly. It was shockingly candid, written in the middle of a breakneck campaign and delivered amid great turmoil, a trick not unlike trying to comb your hair in a wind tunnel.

He may have felt he had no choice. The storm over the inflammatory words of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, lashing out against whites was threatening his historic candidacy. Obama did have a choice about whether to just deal with the controversy or to plunge into the tenderest -- and most combustible -- subject in America, race.

He chose the latter. The last time a candidate had to confront an episode as perilous as this was Bill Clinton in 1992 after Gennifer Flowers came forward and said she'd had a relationship with him. The Clintons' response in a ``60 Minutes'' TV interview was billed as a totally candid exchange on the most delicate of matters. It fell far short of that.

Flowers was hardly an aberration. And Hillary, who denied any intent to stand by her man, suffering like Tammy Wynette, did just that. Still, the limited hangout worked well enough to propel Clinton through a dangerous moment in his candidacy.

Brutally Honest

The jury is very much out, but Obama's dramatic effort on March 18 may prove to be the opposite -- searing honesty about a complex, emotional subject which turns out to be, for the candidate, no help at all.

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, it may be that America can't handle the truth and that, for political expediency, Obama should have made like a Clinton: Deliver a clean, sound-bite- ready break from Wright that Reagan Democrats in Pennsylvania could have batted around at the Knights of Columbus hall.

Instead, he renounced the sin but not the sinner, recognizing that each race has grievances the other has trouble acknowledging. It was an almost hour-long speech that required voters to sit still, open their minds, and listen for nuance, a challenge during a bare-knuckles campaign. It's why nuance is so rarely attempted.

While every editorial I saw praised the speech, I didn't hear many Republicans doing so. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it ``intellectually, fundamentally dishonest.''

Republicans for Obama

Some Republicans are switching from hoping that Clinton, with her high negatives, will win the nomination to rooting for Obama with the possibility of even higher negatives if the Wright videos with their porn-flick graininess and hysterical tone continue to dominate the conversation.

Republican strategist Alex Castellanos says his party is, for the first time, ``rethinking Hillary as their favorite candidate.''

One Republican particularly unmoved by Obama's speech was Representative Peter King of New York who said his party had ``to make Reverend Wright a centerpiece of the campaign.''

This is the same King who pointedly overlooked the murderous tactics of the Irish Republican Army and its association with Hezbollah as he vigorously justified their cause in the 1980s and 90s.

`Eat This Up'

One consultant, Rick Wilson, who made the 2002 ad linking former Democratic Senator Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden, told politico.com the Republicans should ``eat this up like cake.''

We'll see if Rush Limbaugh switches his fervid hope for a Clinton candidacy to Obama, as he pleads with dittoheads to cross over and vote for a Democrat in open primaries to ensure the weakest one gets the nomination.

If Obama gave the speech at any other time, it would be a welcome opportunity to speak about what remains largely unspeakable. When he said he cringed when his white grandmother who loved him more than anyone in the world made hurtful remarks about blacks, I cringed at the memory of remarks made within my own family.

That was a generation ago. Now, I live next door to an all- black church. Every Sunday a prosperous-looking group chats on the sidewalk outside, and then goes inside and shouts ``Amen'' to invocations of their struggles against injustice.

Owning Up

I asked a churchgoer about Wright's crackpot notion that the government had inflicted AIDS upon the black community. She scoffed but asked me to remember an accusation that once seemed equally farfetched: that the government had secretly withheld treatment for syphilis, while pretending to provide it, from 399 black men from 1932 to 1972 to further medical research.

The government didn't own up to the Tuskegee Experiment until forced to after it was exposed in 1975.

There Obama stood in the City of Brotherly Love, an imperfect man giving a nearly perfect speech on the toughest of topics. What he hoped to transcend now, for the moment at least, defines him. If it ultimately doesn't help him become president, he should take consolation that it helped his country.

(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net