COLT pays 30 times Spring’s bid: Orange misses out by £110
Sealed bids, hated and feared by those trying to buy a house, proved equally difficult to judge for those companies bidding for the 6MHz “guardband” frequency auctioned off by Ofcom.
The frequencies, at 1781.7-1785MHz paired with 1876.7-1880MHz, attracted 14 bids, resulting in 12 awarded licenses. The licenses are for low power, local use, and are technology neutral. The most likely use is for enterprise or campus GSM services.
But figures released by UK regulator Ofcom show there was a wide disparity in the winning bids. COLT bid over £1.5 million for its license, and has exactly the same rights as Spring Mobil, whose tender was thirty times lower at £50,110. Teleware was also a heavy bidder, just topping a million pounds. BT decided £275,000 would be about right.
Orange and Zynetix, like housebuyers hoping nobody else would have noticed the property bid only the reserve price at £50,000, losing out by just £110 to Spring. Of course, licesnses are tradeable to these situations are not necessarily fixed.
Spokespeople for COLT and Teleware said they were not disappointed to have paid so much, relatively speaking, for the licenses.
“We looked at the value of the opportunity, and the value is well in excess of our bid,” said a COLT spokeswoman. “A lower bid would have risked losing the licence.”
“It would have been nice if it was cheaper, but it was nice to get the licence,” said Teleware’s marketing manager Lesley Hansen.
The single-round sealed bid auction took place on 20 April 2006.