C-Block Auction: "Th-th-th-that's All Folks"

Well, it's over. The fat lady has sung. Elvis has left the building. The FCC re-auction of PCS licenses for the C, D, E and F blocks has ended. The auction got off to a slow start back in March but picked up speed by round 22 and finished in a flurry after 78 rounds. The final bid total came to $412.8 million, or about $3.60 per POP.

The much-coveted Chicago and Dallas markets were won by Cook Inlet/VoiceStream, which is backed by Western Wireless. Cook Inlet was the highest bidder in the auction with 28 winning bids totaling $192.3 million; $117.9 million was bid for Chicago and $62.4 million for Dallas. Cook Inlet plans to get its GSM systems up and running in the two markets within the next two years.

Omnipoint was the highest bidder in terms of population, winning a total of 18.9 million POPs at a cost of $2.39 per POP. For $45.1 million, Omnipoint was able to both add new markets and expand its existing footprint.

It was a good day for GSM carriers.

And it wasn't a bad day for at least one CDMA carrier.

"We're delighted with the auction's outcome," said Daniel Pegg, Leap Wireless International senior vice president of public affairs. Pegg is confident that the FCC will rule in Leap's favor regarding the pending question of whether the Qualcomm spin-off can be considered a small company and therefore qualified to procure the small-company licenses it bid on.

Although many of the other auction participants were close-mouthed, taking to heart the FCC's imposition of a 10-day gag order, Leap had no qualms about talking up its auction achievements -- just one more stride in a series of bounding "leaps" Leap has been making since its inception last September.

"When we started, the only one of our ventures that was launched and operational was in Chile," Pegg said. "Now we are up and running in all of our markets except Australia -- and our plan doesn't even call for us to begin on that until later this year."

Leap has been in the news a lot lately -- first with its Cricket service offering in Chattanooga, TN, and most recently with its service launch in St. Petersburg, Russia.

"We've also just acquired the remaining 50% that we did not own of our Chilean operation," Pegg said. "Leap is now the 100% owner of Chilesat PCS."

And Leap has no plans to slow down anytime soon.

"We're already looking forward to our 36 new opportunities to expand beyond that," Pegg said. "If you look at the nature of the properties we bought, you'll note that they're all ideally suited to the Cricket concept."

During the auction, Leap enjoyed the advantage of not needing a national footprint or having any particular market that it needed to focus on.

"We weren't as constrained as some to the other bidders," Pegg said. "We were able to just go where we hoped there might be a good opportunity and, if somebody drove that price up above what we deemed reasonable, we'd just as easily go somewhere else."

So did Leap end up getting all it had hoped for from the re-auction?

"All that and more," Pegg said. "Much more."