And simply to quote one of the folks who’ve reported it, Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm;
“The 700 MHz auction ended yesterday, and the $19.59 billion going to the Treasury looks like a lot until you realize the government’s total budget is $2.9 trillion. But now the waiting (and speculating) can begin.”
Who paid the $4.75 billion for the C block???

It appears that way…
Michal Lev-Ram tells us, on a topic that seemingly most have forgotten about;
Wireless spectrum auction winding down
“The federal government’s high-profile wireless spectrum auction will likely end in the next few days. That means we could soon find out who won the last major chunks of spectrum available in the United States, which have attracted nearly $20 billion in bids.”
Unfortunately it appears that the “D” block – the portion saved for a public safety network, did not raise a bid sufficient to meet the FCC’s minimum. It is possible that that fact could affect the announcement of the …read more

From Saul Hansell at The New York Times;
“After four more rounds of bidding today (Wednesday), the total bids reached $11.6 billion. That’s good news but for one little detail. Included in that total is $4.3 billion for a block of frequencies called the C block. This represents the single most attractive license in the auction because it would allow for nationwide service. The government has set a reserve price of $4.6 billion for those frequencies. If the bidding doesn’t hit that level, they won’t be sold and the auction will likely be seen as a failure.”
Saul offers us a couple …read more

If you’re following the 700Mhz auction…
700MHz Auction Pulls In $2.8B Worth of Initial Bids
“The FCC kicked off its highly anticipated spectrum auction Thursday with two rounds that brought in $2.8 billion worth of bids by day’s end. Stakeholders are bidding on a valuable swath of spectrum that will become available once television broadcasters shift from analog to digital signals in early 2009.
One of the largest bids was close to $1 billion, and that came from a set of eight bidders who wanted a group of licenses in all 50 states. Anyone looking to trump that bid during the remaining three …read more

That’s what Stephen Labaton writes at The NYT about today’s 700 MHz auction of prized licenses to now available radio spectrum airwaves.
“And the licenses are on the auction block just as it is becoming obvious to industry players and investors that wireless broadband is rapidly becoming the next big thing, the mobile Internet.
The latest government report indicates that in 2006, mobile wireless high-speed subscribers grew nationwide by more than 600 percent, and that during the last half of the year, those subscribers made up nearly two-thirds of the total growth in all high-speed lines.”
You can follow the auctions’ results here. …read more