FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai isn’t the only one upset that Dish Network used two smaller companies to do their bidding, literally. The company enlisted the help of two companies that Dish has an 85% ownership stake in: Northstar and SNR. These two companies were eligible for a 25% discount under the designated small business entity, which came to a total of $ 3 billion. In a recent blog post, T-Mobile CEO John Legere voiced his own opinion on the matter, and companies who buy up wireless spectrum and don’t use it. “AT&T and Verizon showed that they can, and will, dig into their deep pockets to corner the market on available spectrum at nearly any cost. To add insult to injury, the FCC’s rules actually allowed companies that don’t provide wireless service at all to buy up huge amounts of spectrum and sit on it for ten years! The results are not good for consumers. Three companies alone spent an insane $42 billion between them, grabbing a ridiculous 94 percent of the spectrum sold at this auction,” Legere wrote. “This whole thing should scare the hell out of you and every other wireless consumer in the US, because there is another important auction coming next year, and the results have to be different if wireless competition is going to survive.”
Legere also believes the rules for the 2016 incentive auction must be different than this year’s AWS-3 auction. “The next auction will offer up a different type of spectrum. The kind that wireless companies demand the most: low-band spectrum,” he wrote. “If the government wants a competitive wireless market, they need to establish auction rules to reflect that.” Check out how he thinks the FCC should accomplish that here.
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