Airways,web power at auction

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WASHINGTON — The auction for rights to a highly valuable swath of the nation’s airwaves will begin Thursday and is expected to include multibillion-dollar bids from the nation’s two biggest wireless phone companies, Verizon and AT&T, as well as Google.

Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The agency set rules for the airwaves auction.

Although industry executives and analysts agree that Google is unlikely to win any licenses, the company already has an invaluable victory: in setting the auction rules, the Federal Communications Commission has forced the major telephone companies to open their wireless networks to a broader array of telephone equipment and Internet applications.

The radio spectrum licenses, which are to be returned from television broadcasters as they complete their conversion from analog to digital signals in February 2009, are as coveted as oil reserves are to energy companies. They will provide the winners with access to some of the best remaining spectrum — enabling them to send signals farther from a cell tower with far less power, through dense walls in cities, and over wider territories in rural areas that are now underserved.

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.

Equipment makers and content providers are rushing to bring out new products as consumers increasingly use mobile phones and laptop computers to wirelessly connect to the Internet.

“The spectrum that we are auctioning off is going to be the building blocks for the next generation of broadband services,” said Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in an interview last Friday. “It can carry lots of data, penetrates walls easily, travels far and allows for very good broadband wireless service. It will allow a wireless platform to be another competitor in the broadband space.”

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