Bids in the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) AWS-3 spectrum auction continue to climb, Fierce Wireless reports, and after one week – and 20 rounds of bidding – the sale has generated a total of USD25.77 billion in provisionally winning bids. According to FCC data viewed by the website, the highest provisional winning bid so far is USD1.71 billion for a paired 10MHz block of spectrum in the J-block covering the New York City area, which has consistently been the most popular licence with bidders. Meanwhile, a J-block licence covering the Los Angeles area has attracted a provisional winning bid of USD1.26 billion as of round 20.

The paired spectrum in the AWS-3 auction runs from 1755MHz-1780MHz (uplink) and 2155MHz-2180MHz for downlink, and those bands are said to have drawn the overwhelming majority of bids to date. By comparison, the unpaired uplink spectrum licences in the 1695MHz-1710MHz band have received only a fraction of the bids.

As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, the FCC is auctioning off 880 licences for the larger ‘Economic Area’ franchises alongside 734 concessions for smaller ‘Cellular Market Area’ franchises. A total of 70 companies were qualified to participate in the auction process, including AT&T Mobility (bidding as AT&T Wireless Services 3 LLC), DoCoMo Pacific, Puerto Rico Telephone Company, Teleguam Holdings and T-Mobile US. Verizon Wireless is bidding as Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, while satellite TV giant DISH Network is bidding under the name American AWS-3 Wireless.