Auction 97 Good for Spectrum Owners, Says New Street Research

AWS-3 auction prices are a positive for spectrum owners like Globalstar and Sprint, said New Street Research analysts Friday in a research note. The auction demonstrates that the value of marginal spectrum is higher than everyone thought, and that “mid-band [spectrum] no longer trades at a discount to low-band,” they said. Globalstar’s spectrum has a unique utility, making it difficult to extrapolate values for traditional wireless spectrum to its spectrum, they said. But “what their spectrum offers is capacity, and capacity is worth more today than the market realized yesterday,” they said. Auction 97 began last week.