America and Technology held hostage by greedy Corporations

It's sad

The once Technologically advanced Country in the world now held to second class status by the very same Corporations that once made it great.

This is what happens when you give people too much power. Greed takes over.

3-23-2012

Comcast admits to spectrum squatting for highest bidder

A top Comcast executive said during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that it had tried to sell its AWS spectrum to "virtually every wireless carrier in the country" before forging a multi-billion dollar deal with Verizon Wireless.

The cable operator held talks with T-Mobile USA in 2010, Cohen said, but declined to provide specifics about other negotiations because of nondisclosure agreements.

The AWS transaction, announced shortly before AT&T abandoned the T-Mobile deal, was seen as a major coup for Verizon. Verizon also inked a cross-marketing deal and formed a joint venture with its cable partners at the same time the AWS sale agreement was made.

Comcast is one of a group of four cable operators that banded together as SpectrumCo during the FCC's 2006 spectrum auction to pay $2.4 billion for more than 150 AWS licenses covering about 94 percent of the U.S. population. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Cox Communications originally planned to use the airwaves to build their own network, but eventually gave up on the strategy after it became clear they would not be able to compete against incumbent providers.

Cohen was the only representative from SpectrumCo present at the hearing. Comcast holds the largest portion of the group's spectrum holdings and will receive $2.3 billion if the $3.9 billion transaction goes through.