T-Mobile has taken an aggressive stance early in the AWS auction as it fights for future UMTS spectrum and as its rapid growth clip entered an unexpected lull in the last quarter.

On Wednesday, T-Mobile led in the first round of bidding but was knocked out of the top spot by Wireless DBS, a joint venture between satellite programming providers DirecTV and EchoStar Communications, which had bid $282.5 million for 13 licenses. T-Mobile still had the highest bids for 23 licenses, totaling $121.7 million. But by the end of round 4 today, T-Mobile had lost its lead on one of those licenses. However, its leading bid totals had risen to $163.2 million. T-Mobile appears to be focusing its bids on the large regional licenses, which would give the carrier the footprint to deploy a nationwide 3G network, but it is also bidding on several metro area licenses in larger cities.

T-Mobile today reported second-quarter subscriber growth of 613,000 customers, after three straight quarters of adding 1 million plus customers. T-Mobile said the lower results were related directly to a new policy instituted in April requiring new customers to sign a two-year instead of a one-year contract.

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