The AWS auction is moving to ‘Round Two’ as of Monday morning:
The auction will move to stage 2 on June 9, 2008 at 09:00 in round 35. The activity rule will be 90 percent. In a round, bidders must be active on licences covering 90 percent of their total eligibility points in order to maintain that level of eligibility points in the following round. The percentage bid increment will be 8 percent and the absolute increment will be $2000/point.
Recall that when the auction opened, the increment was 15%, then this slowed to 10% last week.
As a sign that we are starting to reach an asymptote around $3.25B, the total bid price has only been increasing by about $10M between round 34 versus 33.
What does the level of bidding mean for the future competitive landscape? Vince Valentini has cut price targets for Quebecor, TELUS and Rogers because of the spectrum cost.