Bidding in the Advanced Wireless Services auction has started to slow down, but the total has reached nearly $13 billion. Original estimates for the auction put the high estimate at $15 billion. Overall bidding has slowed, but there is still competition on a few choice licenses.
T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless have both concentrated on large regional licenses, leaving the other bidders to compete for the smaller slices. Of the 1,122 licenses put up for sale, only 144 have not been bid on.
Here's the high bidder's list after 38 rounds:
Could someone please tell me why Verizon is participating in the AWS auctions? They already have EVDO, which is what they, and many others, have been calling 3G. What would they do with another 20Mhz of bandwidth?