Yesterday(1/24), the much anticipated auction for the 700-MHz band began. The licenses for these frequencies are being returned from television broadcasters who are being required to switch from analog to digital in 2009(the licenses will be turned over in February of next year).

The New York Times called these licenses “as coveted as oil reserves are to energy companies”.

People are mixed in the implications of the auction with some, like the Chairman of the FCC saying, “the spectrum that we are auctioning off is going to be the building blocks for the next generation of broadband services.” It can carry lots of data, penetrates walls easily, travels far and allows for very good broadband wireless service. It will allow a wireless platform to be another competitor in the broadband space.” But others aren’t so sure with Robert X. Cringley writing in Popular Mechanics that,

What’s good for voice is not always good for data, however. Lower frequencies travel farther but they inherently carry less data, having lower so-called spectral efficiency. And the way cellular providers plan out data networks is very different from the architecture of voice networks. Optimal data networks (such as the EVDO services currently run by Verizon and Sprint, and the HSDPA network run by AT&T) require smaller cells and lower power to reduce interference and increase the total data throughput not per cell but per square mile. Even the best implementations, however, have limited overall bandwidth (as one network engineer told me, “the dirty little secret of cellular data is that two customers with Slingboxes can take down an entire EVDO cell”). Networks based on the 700-MHz spectrum would be even less ideal for use as a data network in urban environments.

Inforworld has an interesting article about how the wireless spectrum auction could change your life, which sheds more light on the debate about the ultimate implications of the auction.

And then there’s the story of Google, who was successfully in helping to set the auction rules, and according to those rules some of the open access consessions, which would force openness of the spectrum to third party developers like Google, only occur if bidding or the C block(one of the blocks of spectrum) hit $4.6 billion.

Cringly believes that Google may attempt to either simply bid this minimum to make sure that this openness happens, or bid to win, and then trade the block to Sprint/Nextel for some of the company’s 2.5 GHz WiMAX licenses, which are far better suited for data.

According to Cringely, Sprint’s WiMAX strategy is in flux following the firing of CEO Gay orsee, who was a big WiMAX backer, and it gets even better with Sprint announcing the departures of their CFO, CMO, and Sales Chief effective today.

It will definately be interesting to watch, and the future of the mobile internet may be shaped by the auction. In 2006, mobile internet subscribers grow nationwide by more than 600 percent(no data is available for 2007 yet).

People can follow the daily bids of the auction(with only amounts not names of bidders) at auctions.fcc.gov(its auction 73). 

There’s also a panel that just went on at Davos World Economic Forum called the Future of Mobile Technology. With a panel that included Google CEO Eric Schmidt, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, SK Telecom CEO Kim Shin-Bae, and China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou(SK Telecom is the dominate mobile provider in Korea, and China Mobile the dominate provider in China). Both TechCrunch and BuzzMachine have interesting summaries of the panel.

The panel had very interestings opinions on the importance of mobile, with Schmidt(Google) making the claim that mobile devices are potentially more interesting than PCs, and Jianzhou(China) suggesting that people are using mobile devices as extensions of themselves. As for content, Stringer(Sony) was pessimistic about the ability to sell content on mobiles, but Zucker(NBC) was optomistic, and NBC is going to put out 2,200 hours of programming on Mobile for the olympics.

The 700-MHz auction will probably have an impact on the future of mobile communications, and we’ll see whether content will reign on the cell phone or not.

The funniest thing to come out of the panel, though, is when someone asked whether any of the companies planned to include olfactory functionality in phone since its the only scent not addressed by the internet…yeah…I know.

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