Dish said in a statement its representatives, along with those of Northstar Wireless and SNR Wireless, met yesterday with staff of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau to discuss a draft order on the issue that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has circulated to the other commissioners.
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The FCC found that SNR and Northstar are still eligible to hold those licenses, Dish said in the statement. In addition, the FCC won’t bring the matter to a hearing or refer it to the U.S. Department of Justice, Dish said.
In a statement, Dish Executive Vice President Stanton Dodge said “we respectfully disagree with the proposed denial of the bidding credits”.
The draft order, which is still subject to change, must go to the full commission for a vote. Dish, as you might expect, doesn’t agree with the FCC’s ruling.
Late last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the FCC had concluded that Dish’s practices were in violation of the spirit of the AWS-3 auction and therefore it will have to pay the extra $3.3 billion.
The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.
It participated via three smaller subsidiaries, two of which – Northstar Wireless and SNR Wireless – won spectrum.
Northstar and SNR were winners in the record-setting $44.9 billion airwaves auction with combined bids of about $13.3 billion – a sum that would drop to $10 billion with the discounts. As the FCC is nearly certain to scrap the small business bidding credit rule, the company will now have to compete on an equal footing with cash-rich companies such as AT&T and Verizon and could find it hard to mobilize finances. The FCC is also going to prohibit multiple applications by one party and by parties with common controlling interests, which would prevent a replay of Dish’s AWS-3 strategy.
“In any event, the next steps for Dish and the Designated Entities is to file some stays and then a petition for reconsideration”, BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk wrote in a blog post.
During the AWS 3 auction early this year, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Dish collectively spent $41.3 billion for spectrum near the now deployed AWS 1.7/2.1GHz spectrum. Its likeliest response is a legal challenge to the FCC’s order.
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When it comes to wireless carriers, it doesn’t matter how good a deal they can offer, or how good their LTE networks are, if they don’t have enough spectrum to keep up with supply and demand, problems will soon arise.
