The 700 MHz auction has attracted 1,849 bids totaling more than $2.4 billion in its first round, reports RCR News. Naturally, there’s no indication of who is bidding where, but the bids on the individual blocks are apparent:
—The commercial-public safety block of spectrum, D-Block, received a $472 million bid, with the minimum bid for the second round being nearly $543 million. The reserve price is $1.3 billion, which will have to be reached for the winner to be required to build a network that is shared with first responders.
—A collection of eight regional licenses in the open-access C Block covering the 50 states received a bid of just over $1 billion, with the minimum bid for the next round being just over $1.2 billion. The bidding has to reach the reserve price of $4.6 billion to ensure the open-access provisions kick in, but it’s widely believed Google (NSDQ: GOOG) will bid up to at least that.