The US Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) auction closed this month with T-Mobile topping the bids at around $4.2 million but revenues generated may have been dampened by national security concerns...

Says J.H. Snider, Research Director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Program: ‘Despite all the hoopla over the high revenue it is actually pretty low, less than $1 on a per MHz population basis. That is less than a quarter of its peak in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.’ There are a number of possible reasons why the numbers remained relatively low but one got virtually no attention in the press. ‘Some of the federal users of this band didn’t reveal their precise locations and uses because of claimed national security concerns,’ says Snider. ‘For a sophisticated investor, that ignorance added a risk factor and would surely have dampened prices...’

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