The UK's largest ever mobile spectrum auction is now under way, with seven bidders competing to acquire new airwaves suitable for superfast mobile broadband services.
The following organisations are bidding in the auction:
Everything Everywhere Limited
HKT (UK) Company Limited (a subsidiary of PCCW Limited)
Hutchison 3G UK Limited
MLL Telecom Ltd
Niche Spectrum Ventures Limited (a subsidiary of BT Group plc)
Telefnica UK Limited
Vodafone Limited
The new spectrum will almost double the amount of airwaves currently available for mobile broadband services on smartphones, tablets and laptops.
Ed Richards, Ofcom Chief Executive, said: Today's 4G auction is a very significant milestone for the UK's communications sector.
It will release the essential raw material for the next wave of mobile digital services. This will change the way we consume digital media in both our personal and working lives and deliver significant benefits to millions of consumers and businesses across the country.
Protecting competition
The UK is the most price competitive mobile phone market in Europe1. Healthy competition means that UK consumers benefit from better services at lower prices than most other countries in the world. In order to maintain competition, Ofcom has designed the auction to ensure that at least four different operators have sufficient spectrum to be credible national 4G wholesalers. The net benefit of doing this, for consumers and the UK economy as a whole, will be very significantly greater than any immediate financial benefits from revenue raised by the auction.
Bidding process
Bids are being placed online over secure connections, using software that has been developed specifically for the auction. The bidding will continue over several rounds and is expected to take a number of weeks until the final winners are known.
No updates on bidding activity will be provided until the conclusion of the auction (see: How the auction will work' below). Due to the nature of the auction, it is important that information about the bids being placed remains confidential until the auction concludes to reduce any potential risk of strategic bidding which could distort the outcome of the auction.
Once fees are paid, licences will be granted, enabling operators to start rolling out new networks. It is expected that services will be launched by a range of providers from late spring / summer 2013.
Auction lots
Bidders will be competing for 28 lots of spectrum in two separate bands 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz. The lower frequency 800 MHz band is part of the digital dividend' freed up when analogue terrestrial TV was switched off, which is ideal for widespread mobile coverage.
The higher frequency 2.6GHz band is ideal for delivering the capacity needed for faster speeds. These two bands add up to 250 MHz of additional mobile spectrum, compared to 333 MHz in use today. Both bands are being packaged into smaller lots of spectrum for the auction.
This combination of low and high frequency spectrum creates the potential for 4G mobile broadband services to be widely available across the UK, while offering capacity to cope with significant demand in urban centres.
Auction design
The auction format being used in the 4G auction is called a combinatorial clock' auction, which has been used by Ofcom in previous auctions and by other regulators in recent spectrum auctions around the world. This format is designed to achieve the most efficient outcome putting the spectrum in the hands of the bidders who value it most highly, while also ensuring they pay a competitive price. Below is a guide to how the format works.
How will the auction work?
The format of the auction is based on basic principles of supply and demand. It takes place over a number of rounds as described below.
Combination of lots
The first point to understand is that each bidder is competing to win a combination of spectrum lots from across both the 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz bands. The amount they are prepared to pay for each individual lot will vary depending on how much of the other lots they could get at the same time.The auction lets people tell Ofcom what they would pay for specific combinations.
Opt-in round
The first stage of the auction is the opt-in stage which took place on 18 January 2013.At this stage, bidders that were eligible to win reserved spectrum (i.e. bidders other than Vodafone, Telefnica and EE) could choose whether they wished to bid for that spectrum.If they wished to do so, they needed to make a bid at reserve prices for combinations of lots that would be sufficient for them to compete effectively as national wholesalers.
Principal stage (clock stage)
In the next stage of the auction (the clock stage), which started today, the auction proceeds through a number of rounds. At the start of each round Ofcom announces a price for each lot and each bidder then specifies what combination of lots they would most like to win at those prices. In each subsequent round Ofcom increases the prices for lots that have excess demand, until eventually demand matches supply. At this point the clock stage ends.
Supplementary bids round
If this were a simple auction for a single lot then this would be the end of the process, but because bidders have been bidding for combinations of lots, it could well be that at this point some of the spectrum lots would go unsold if Ofcom simply stopped the process (for example because the last price rise for some lots led to a sharp reduction in demand). Ofcom will therefore hold a single further round of bidding, called the supplementary bids' round. This is where bidders are allowed to supplement the bids they have already made with their best and final offers' for any of the packages that
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The UK's largest ever mobile spectrum auction is now under way, with seven bidders competing to acquire new airwaves suitable for superfast mobile broadband services.
