Wowza -- $20 billion is a lot of dough for what essentially amounts to air. After a mere 260 rounds of bidding, the FCC has wrapped the auction of the 700 MHz chunk of the wireless spectrum. And the amount that the auction brought in to government coffers should -- emphasis on "should" -- draw widespread attention in DC to how important to America's technological future are innovative technologies that operate on the high-quality spectrum space returned to the public by the switch to digital television. As of now, we don't know a great deal about how the auction went in terms of which corporations came out winners and which come out losers. We won't know that until the identities of the winning bidders are made public in the next couple of months. And we'll have to wait for the dust to settle to see how good a job that the FCC has done managing what is, at the end of the day, a resource that belongs to the American public.
But one thing we do now is that the 700 MHz auction pulled in a whole lot of scratch. It's crass, I know, but if the size of that number draws some much needed attention in Washington to how important wireless innovation can be to the future of this country, then I say so be it.
