back to article FCC under pressure to reduce D block cost

The FCC is being asked to reduce the minimum bid for the the last of the 700MHz blocks, due to be auctioned next year, as $750m is a lot of money for frequencies to which the buyers won't have exclusive access. Next year the FCC will be auctioning off D Block spectrum, again, and despite bids of only $472m last time it's …

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  1. Henry Wertz Gold badge
    Pirate

    Yep...

    Yep.. the big concern I would have with D block is the public safety stuff. I mean, I could totally see public safety agencies leaning on the winner "You have to build out faster! Too many coverage holes! Public safety!" Realize that the continental US is roughly the size of Europe and you can see where a problem could arise building out that much coverage that fast. Noone has a nationwide network right now -- the merged Verizon Wireless and Alltel will have by far the largest network but it's still going to be swiss cheese on a national level, when you don't count roaming.

    The part about public safety having priority -- no concern on that. CDMA and even analog had capability for "important" phones to get priority over regular ones, to the point of even kicking users off an overloaded network so the important call goes through at high quality. There could be an administrative burden over keeping track of these special phones though -- they couldn't be resold without being reprogrammed to not be flagged "important".

    Skull and crossbones because... well I don't know I just felt like it.

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