Qualcomm Inc., based in San Diego, announced Thursday that the $558 million in spectrum licenses it won would double the capacity of the mobile TV service it offers from Orange County to Northern California and on the East Coast.
Verizon Communications Inc. Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg said Friday that the $9.36 billion in total spectrum licenses won by the company's wireless unit, jointly owned with Vodafone Group, was "nothing short of a transformative opportunity for our company."
He downplayed the FCC's open-access conditions on a major portion of the spectrum it won, saying the industry was headed in that direction anyway. Verizon Wireless has pledged to let customers use any device or software program on its entire network by the end of the year.
But the regulations scared AT&T Inc. away from bidding on the open-access chunk of airwaves.
AT&T was second to Verizon, winning $6 billion in spectrum licenses, which it also plans to use for high-speed Internet service. But its executives said they didn't bid for the portion subject to the open-access rules. The parts it did land cost AT&T nearly three times as much per unit of spectrum than the portion Verizon bought.
With concerns that the open-access rules would lead large wireless companies to ignore that portion of spectrum, Google had promised to bid at least the minimum. Bidding was anonymous and, following the auction rules, started below the $4.6-billion minimum price. Google was the only bidder for several days at the auction's start, and it stopped after a $4.71-billion bid on Jan. 31. Verizon topped that three days later.
Having met its primary goal for the auction, Google never submitted another bid, Adler said.
But making a play for the wireless spectrum became more than just a business proposition. It also was "a new sort of puzzle to figure," said Minnie Ingersoll, a product manager on the auction team.
Google uses its own auctions to sell ads linked to search results. And the FCC's complex online auction appealed to the geeky side of the company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
"Larry and Sergey really dove into understanding the details of the auction," Adler said.
In addition to frequently stopping by Google's auction "war room," Page and Brin each submitted one of Google's bids.
"They wanted to be the one that pressed the button," Adler said.
The half-a-dozen members of the auction team also were fascinated, Ingersoll said, amusing themselves with straw polls about the unknowns such as how many bidders would emerge.
"I was impressed that nobody was successfully able to predict the outcome," she said.
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jim.puzzanghera @latimes.com
