Italy Attracts 29 WiMAX Spectrum Bidders

12:20 am on January 22, 2008 | Category: Business, Regulation, WiMAX, Wireless Technology

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Italy’s communications ministry has received a total of 29 offers for an upcoming auction of WiMAX broadband spectrum, according to a statement by officials.

The list of companies that intend to bid include Italy’s incumbent telecom operator, Telecom Italia, as well as mobile phone carrier, Wind Telecommunicazioni, and broadband internet provider, FASTWEB.

“The presentation of 29 offers for WiMax frequencies is a positive and important premise for the auction which is about to start,” commented Italy’s Minister of Communications, Paolo Gentiloni.

The auction is scheduled to officially begin at 10:00 am local time on Wednesday, January 30.

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    1. The auctions for the 3.5 GHz Spectrum attracted total bids of just over $200 million. Some of the bidders with winning bids over all regions included AriaDSL and AFT. It is expected that both enterprise applications and WiFi connectivity using WiMAX will get off to a good start with this auction.

      Comment by Amitabh Kumar — March 10, 2008 #

    2. Yet another indicator for rollout of WiMAX in Europe has now turned green with spectrum for Mobile WiMAX being allocated in Italy, one of the last bastions where the auctions were completed in this February. The licenses (35 licenses in all) for three blocks of 21 MHz each ( paired) for all the markets were auctioned in Italy for Euros 136 Million. These licenses were auctioned in the 3.5 GHz band. The largest successful bidder was Linkem with nationwide footprint. It is now launching its first network in the city of Bari with the services “ Wireless DSL” and VoIP. Mobile WiMAX services are already being provided in UK, Ireland and Iceland.
      The Italian auctions follow those in Germany ( Euros 86 million) and France.
      The German operator DBD has already commenced building the network with orders of over 500 base stations placed with Airspan and commenced service in select cities. WiMAX has already been launched in France by SHD and some of the recent launches include WiMAX Virtual Network Operators.
      In the meantime the remaining countries have all announced WiMAX spectrum auctions to enable early network rollouts. Serbia , Portugal and Georgia have announced 3.5 GHz spectrum auctions recently. A common feature of the use of the 3.4 Ghz spectrum is that mobility is to be permitted as per the WiMAX forum profiles. Those supporting include amongst others the Ofcom UK and Portugal.
      Mobile WiMAX is now entering the premier league with many countries announcing opening auctions for prime spectrum in the 2.5-2.6 GHz band. This includes the Ofcom UK (2010-2025 MHz and 2500-2690 MHz), Austria ( 2500 ~ 2690 MHz) and Sweden ( 2500 ~ 2690 MHz). Norway has already auctioned Spectrum in the 2.6 GHz band. In Norway the spectrum for 2.6 GHz has already been auctioned to five companies for $42 million. Spectrum in the 2.5-2.6 GHz is considered prime owing to better reach of the WiMAX radios in buildings and greater availability of devices and fetches nearly double the pricing as that for the 3.4 GHz band.
      Technology neutrality, which was a basic tenet of use of spectrum announced by the EU in 2007 will guide the use of spectrum in many of the countries of EU. In contrast to its earlier preferred spectrum of 3.5 GHz for WiMAX, the 2.5-2.69 GHz spectrum is now being favored for use in mobile WiMAX, if the ongoing and announced auctions are any indications. This is set to bring in a major compatibility in the mobile WiMAX networks in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

      Comment by Amitabh Kumar — April 28, 2008 #

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