Most carriers live by the maxim “You can never have enough spectrum.” Now the FCC has adopted a variant: “You can never sell enough spectrum”. Flush from the $19.6 billion 700 MHz auction, the FCC is now examining what other parts of the electromagnetic rainbow it can tap for commercial wireless use. The two prime candidates are new Advanced Wireless Service licenses and, of course, the highly controversial ‘white spaces’ between broadcast channels.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin has scheduled a vote over whether to auction off another 25 MHz of the upper AWS band, but not for the traditional voice and data services of the original AWS sale. Instead, Martin is proposing the winner of said auction would begin an immediate and aggressive roll-out of a nationwide broadband network AND offer service gratis to the end customer. It sounds very similar to the now defunct plans of several muni-Wi-Fi providers, except this would require the operator to actually buy the airwaves it uses. It may sound far-fetched but the FCC has already gotten proposals from at least one company to offer just such a service. M2Z apparently thought enough of the free business model that it took the FCC to court when it rejected its request for the license.

Google founder Larry Page was in Washington this week lobbying the FCC, Congress and anyone else that would listen about the virtues of white space between the 700 MHz spectrum–how it would be an optimal place to shove a new broadband network. The FCC doesn’t appear to be anywhere near a decision on what to do with these nooks between television broadcast channels. It does, however, have the National Association of Broadcasters breathing down its neck to kill such a proposal, while Google pushes for the opposite. Meanwhile it continues to test white space devices, all of which seem to work in the lab, but not necessarily outside of it.

Nokia’s quest to gain greater market share in the U.S. got a welcome boost this week. T-Mobile announced it would launch four new Nokia feature phones this month. Avian securities estimated Nokia has 18% of T-Mobile’s “shelf space”, but that percentage would start inching up in June. T-Mobile is the smallest Tier I operator in the U.S. so Nokifying it handset portfolio won’t have a tremendous impact, but with new CDMA handsets emerging and its support for the new AWS bands, Nokia may see its market share percentages inch up a few points. NPD had Nokia with a No. 4 market share at 8% in Q1, still far behind No. 3 LG Electronics at 17%.

The Cricket EZ phone made the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall list this week because of problems establishing audio connections with 911 systems. Leap Wireless, Cricket’s umbrella company, reported the problem to regulators earlier this year and voluntarily recalled the devices. Leap officials said that it started notifying its customers by phone and text about six weeks ago, asking them to come to Cricket store for a firmware upgrade. About 190,000 phones are on the network, the majority of which have been fixed, Leap said.

Ontela’s networked camera phone platform is gaining some momentum among U.S. operators–at least the smaller ones. Cincinnati Bell this week launched Ontela’s photo upload application, which uses the cellular data network to automatically transfer photos snapped with a cameraphone to online photo storage sites or a customer’s PC. Alltel launched the same service in April.

Robert Burst took over as Sprint’s chief financial officer today, and I’m sure he’s had better first days on the job. If Standard & Poor’s cutting Sprint’s credit rating to junk status wasn’t enough, a federal appeals court sided with the FCC, requiring Sprint switch off its iDEN network in 800 MHz in all markets by June 26, regardless of whether the public safety agencies occupying its replacement spectrum are ready to leave. more

The former CEO of a struggling operator is now taking over the board of a struggling vendor. It’s probably crossed more than a few of your minds that Dave Dorman played none too small a role in SBC’s acquisition of AT&T, which eventually took his former company’s venerable moniker before he retired. Now as chairman of Motorola, he’ll oversee Moto’s split into two entities: one focused solely on handsets and the other on a diverse array of carrier, enterprise, government and consumer equipment. more

If Sprint were a celebrity it would be a regular feature on Entertainment Tonight: the ruffled carrier in and out of rehab that is constantly seen gallivanting with the industry’s biggest stars. First it was Verizon, then it was T-Mobile, and the constant rumors of an Intel tie-up with Clearwire and Sprint never seem to go away. The Wall Street Journal now has Time Warner Cable and Comcast pegged as Sprint’s latest partners, and this time it might be right. more

All of the bids may be in, and the auction may have generated more than double its projected earnings, but after the 700 MHz auction’s close some people are asking why there weren’t a few more bids and a few more billion dollars in the pot. Specifically consumer advocates are pointing to the controversial D-block shared public safety/commercial license, which received only a single bid and failed to meet its reserve price after 261 rounds. more

The FCC closed the seemingly endless Auction 73 late this afternoon after no bids were submitted in Round 261. The Auction raised $19.592 billion in 28 days, but the winners of the 700 MHz licenses still remain a mystery. The FCC said it expects to reveal the secret identities of the high bidders in the next 10 days. There’s still no word on the fate of the D-block shared public safety/commercial license, which failed to reach its minimum reserve price. (See story to follow.)

Anyone who thought the current sorry state of economic affairs in the U.S. would produce an equally sorry Auction 73 can toss those doubts outside. Though all excitement surrounding the auction dissipated weeks ago, it’s kept chugging along, entering its 210th round today, raising $19.6 billion, and beating 2006’s AWS auction handily on both counts. Auction 66 raised $13.9 billion and went 161 rounds. Despite the 700 MHz auction’s longevity, it’s bound to wrap up soon (you’ve heard us say that before…).  more

Following my recent article and column on priority text messaging, I received several emails from companies wanting to make their text messaging platforms known or suggesting alternative emergency provisions built into SMS. This included operators’ use of First Delivery Attempt (FDA), a cost-savings measure that tries to circumvent the SMS center to immediately deliver text messages, as well as companies instead focused on improving the viability of these SMS centers.

From the readers, however, rather than focusing on what service providers could do, they focused instead on what they should do. more

While none of the bidders in the 700 MHz auction are making any noise, one U.S. Senator is. Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor is lambasting the FCC, and specifically chairman Kevin Martin’s handling of the auction, despite the $19.5 billion in funds so far raised in difficult economic times. According to a story by Broadcasting & Cable, Pryor told a room full of broadcasters that the auction was a disaster, benefiting the major Tier I vendors to the determent of smaller operators. more

If you listened to my podcast yesterday with Mark McElroy of Connected Nation about their study on the economic impact of pushing broadband into underserved areas of the U.S., you might have been impressed by a big number — $134 billion. That’s the potential economic impact of national deployment of what Connected Nation, a not-for-profit group, has done in Kentucky, with the ConnectKentucky project.

In talking with McElroy, however, I was even more impressed by two other numbers. more