A fierce battle is going on for a single local license covering L.A. In round 4, nine separate bids drove up the price of the 10 MHz chunk to $46.4 million. In the Midwest, a Chicago regional license was bid up to $66 million. But the numbers quickly fall off from there. Licenses for many major metro markets such as San Francisco, San Diego, Denver and Seattle all recorded leading bids under $10 million, many under $5 million.

Though the FCC is keeping all of the bidders’ names secret in Auction 73, it’s too difficult to figure out who many of the likely competitors are. According to Current Analysis wireless services analyst Bill Ho, AT&T and Verizon Wireless are definitely going after the nationwide spectrum in Block C, which will give them a unified band to launch Long Term Evolution networks on in the future. Verizon chief technology officer Dick Lynch said it will likely conduct its initial LTE trials on the Advanced Wireless Services bands, but he identified 700 MHz as an ideal band for the technology due to its high propagation. AT&T hasn’t revealed its 4G plans, but it will almost certainly follow the rest of the GSM world down the LTE path. For those same reasons, Sprint is not participating in the auction, Ho said. Its financial troubles aside, Sprint has already laid out its 4G technology and spectrum plans with WiMAX and the 2.5 GHz bands.

As for the regional licenses, Ho said, Verizon and AT&T are probably competing heavily also, but cable companies Cox Communications and Advanced/Newhouse are also likely bidding on a market-by-market basis to gain spectrum to compliment their cable footprints—as is, in likelihood, Charter Communications, indirectly through Paul Allen’s Vulcan Spectrum. Qualcomm is looking to pick up extra markets for MediaFLO mobile TV network.

Another likely bidder for the metro area licenses is Towerstream, the wireless ISP that sells broadband wireless access to business in large metro areas. Towerstream currently uses unlicensed frequencies over proprietary broadband wireless gear from Aperto and Alvarion, but in a recent interview, CEO Jeff Thompson said Towerstream is attracted to 700 MHz because of the cheap WiMAX gear that is expected to emerge at that frequency after the auction. While Thompson did not reveal which markets Towerstream would bid on nor detail the company’s bidding strategy, he said his company can continue operating with unlicensed gear if it fails to win any licenses. But that doesn’t prevent Towerstream from hunting for bargains.

“We learned when we watched the AWS auction that some of these licenses went very cheap—a lot of it went for minimum bids,” Thompson said. The WiMAX gear at 700 MHz will not only be cheaper than the proprietary gear it buys now, but it will also be more compact, saving installation costs, he said. “We don’t need the spectrum to execute our business plan, but if we can get some spectrum that can eliminate a few truck rolls, why not?”

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