The Auction
On January 24, the Federal Communications Commission will open bidding on 1,099 licenses for the last sliver of airwaves suitable for mobile phones. The F.C.C. has conceded that the industry’s big four—Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile—have a chokehold on wireless communication in this country; to change that, the agency has added some wrinkles to this sale, which has already attracted a gaggle of prospective new players, including Google. For America’s 240 million cell-phone subscribers, the outcome of this auction could be the difference between the same old cell-phone service and a bold new wireless horizon.
 
The Bidding
Auction rules such as high reserves and blind bidding make it impossible to predict who will win the biggest chunk of the band. Blind bidding could favor smaller players because they’re less likely to face defensive bids from the giants. The new restrictions have made bidding partners out of some rivals—Google may even pool resources with Yahoo and eBay to increase their chances.

The 700 Club
As TV broadcasters switch from analog to digital, they compress their bandwidth and free up the 700-megahertz band. The F.C.C. has already sold a small piece of it; the rest will go in five blocks, with unique conditions for each. The ­winner of the ­biggest slice must open up its airwaves to all devices and applications—meaning that for the first time, a company hawking, for example, the latest streaming video app for handhelds won’t need the cooperation of the big four.

Trust-busting?
This is the last chance to break up the hegemony of the industry’s big players, which have spent 20 years gobbling up most of the usable spectrum. In previous auctions, newcomers like DirecTV and EchoStar were trammeled by the dominant players, but this time the F.C.C.’s restrictions make the remaining available bandwidth less appealing to the “cell Bells.”