We Release Our First Actual Industry Report on Upcoming 2.5 GHz Auction.Go us and buy our stuff!

Fellow Wetmachiner and all around spectrum genius Dr.Gregory Rose has written a report on the upcoming FCC Auction 86 in the 2.5 GHz BRS Band. Dubbed “The WiMAX Band: (2.5 GHz): Characteristics, Technology, Major Spectrum Holders in the BRS-EBS Service and Prospects for Auction 86, and edited by Harold Feld, this report contains information vital to understanding how the evolution of the 2.5 GHz band and the FCC auction beginning at the end of October will shape WiMAX Deployment in the United States. Resources with the Report include:

A Searchable Database of All BRS and EBS Licensees and Spectrum Lessees. Anyone who has used the FCC’s Universal License Service knows how difficult it is to search for even basic information. The master database takes all the information and puts it into an easily searched Excel® spreadsheet.

Special breakout tables and coverage maps for Clearwire and Sprint. Convenient tables and coverage maps show the coverage and relationships of these WiMAX giants.

• Analysis of the top 35 other providers. The report also lists the top 35 licensees in the band after Sprint and Clearwire, describing their general market areas and what their spectrum holdings say about their strategies.

The report cost $499 until FCC Auction 86 beginson October 27, at which point it goes up to $799. Those purchasing at $499 may buy the post-Auction update, scheduled to come out 3 months after Auction 86 closes, for a savings of $200 off the full post-auction price.

Copies of the report are available for sale at Broadbandcensus.com and at Muniwireless. Click HERE to get your copy today!

To see the full press release, click here.

To read the executive summary for free,click here.

Stay tuned . . . .

tags: wimax, wimax band, 2.5 GHz, wireless, spectrum, wimax report, wimax auction, fcc, fcc auction, fcc auction 86, harold feld, gregory rose, strength to strength develop-ed.

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Shout Out for New Econ Blog

For those who subscribe to Tales of the Sausage Factory but not Wetmachine Main, I thought I would let you all know that my friend and ace economist Dr. Gregory Rose has started a new blog here at wetmachine called Econoklastic. You can read his first post here. Regular readers will recognize Greg’s name as the author of several spectrum studies that I quote incessantly, such as the ones describing how SpectrumCo and its wireless allies blocked competitors from getting licenses in last year’s AWS auction.

As you can tell from his first post, Greg is quite contrarian and willing to grind more than a few sacred cows into hamburger. It’s why we like to keep him around.

Stay tuned . . . .

Greg Rose and the evolution of a wet machine

Sometime right soon, Dr. Gregory Rose, he of the brilliant fisking of the spectrum auction scam, will be making his inaugural post at his new Wetmachine blog Econoklastic. So may I be the first to welcome him: Welcome, Greg! Welcome to Wetmachine! I have no idea what he’ll write about, but his background leads me to expect good things. Greg describes himself thusly:

I’ve been an academic economist for more than 20 years. My
dissertation was on developing mathematical techniques for aggregating
affective variables in utility functions. I left OSU Tulsa to come to
DC in 2004 to set up a consulting company. I’ve been doing consulting
for the public interest community on telecoms ever since. And I’m a
very unconventional economist: I’m probably the only socialist member
of the Public Choice Society.

Adding another name to the Wetmachine masthead seems as good an occasion as any to launch into some meditative malarky I’ve been cogitating on for some while about where Wetmachine came from, has been, and is tending. Especially since the one-two combination punch of Harold Feld and Greg Rose should pretty much establish Wetmachine as a premiere telecommunication/first amendment/innaleckshul property policy wonk “destination shopping” blog. Which is kind of cool, especially since it’s nothing like what I set out to create when I launched Wetmachine seven years ago. At that time I was mostly trying to pimp my books (still am), and I also was pretty irritated by the technological utopianism of blogs like Slashdot and Boing Boing & I wanted to do something in the same basic zip code as those blogs but much more curmudgeonly and technoskeptical. Sort of a blend of Slashdot and Boing Boing on a bad acid trip by way of the Unabomber Manifesto was what I had in mind. I also imagined that that the now-atrophied Bonehead Computer Museum would evolve into the central attraction of the site. Guess I missed that guess. I had no idea when I invited Harold Feld to blog with me that I was snagging a world-class policy expert with a major talent for snark, nor did I know that Howard Stearns would emerge up to his eyeballs in Croquet at the head of the Web 3.0 movement. Much to my astonishment, and with little help from me, Wetmachine has become of blog of substance (by some definition of “substance”.) Who woulda thunk it? Any of y’all as may be interested in some more of my navel-gazing, feel free to follow me below the fold.

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Dr. Rose Proves It Was Spectrum Co. In The Kitchen With the Candlestick . . .

My good friend Dr. Gregory Rose has released two studies on last summer’s AWS Auction. I just bloged about them at length over at the Public Knowledge policy blog. So rather than repeat myself, I will merely say:

I argued after the AWS auction that cable companies and wireless incumbents had used the auction to kill DBS as a competitor. Rose proves that in his first report,
How Incumbents Blocked New Entrants In The AWS-1 Auction: Lessons For The Future.

Rose’s second report, Tacit Collusion In The AWS Auction: The Signalling Problem, looks at the use of bids to communicate. Again, as I’ve argued before, only by adopting anonymous bidding rules can the FCC stop bidders from suing the auction process to signal each other.

For the rest of my commentary, check out my PK blog.

Stay tuned . . . .

But Do Spectrum Auctions *Really* Suck? According to Center for American Progress Report, You bet!

In all the hustle and bustle, it rather blew by that my friends Dr. Gregory Rose and Mark Lloyd have written this analysis of ten years of FCC spectrum auction data.

Summary — FCC auctions turn out to be great ways for incumbents to exclude new entrants and to bilk the government. They do not yield the promised efficiencies of distribution or even maximize revenue to the government. There are ways to improve the process, but the FCC open ascending auction systems just about ensures that a collection of incumbents can keep out any genuinely disruptive competitors and collude to minimize revenue to the government and maintain the status quo.

 

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