Yesterday, ARCEP announced the results of the 2.6 GHz FDD spectrum auction in France. A total of 140 MHz was sold off for a total of €936 million ($1.26 billion), far exceeding the reserve price of €700 million. Good news for the French government!
I was recently asked by a business associate how to estimate the capital costs of an LTE network. Inevitably our discussion led to estimating the number of sites required to cover a market. Designing to meet coverage requirements along with its complement, capacity requirements, form the basis for estimating the size, and consequently cost, of the radio access network. This is something that differentiates the financial modeling service provided by Telesystem Innovations. So I like to expand in this post on a few general principles related to path loss models which play a critical part is determining cell size.
Last week, Korea’s largest mobile network operator SK Telecom successfully acquired 20 MHz of spectrum in the 1.8 GHz band for 995 billion won ($924 million). SK Telecom, which plans to use this band for LTE, beat out KT Corp which dropped out of the race as the price exceeded twice the reserve level of 445.5 billion won set by the KCC (Korea Communications Commission). KT Corp settled for a 10 MHz license in 800 MHz for the minimum bidding price of 261 billion won ($242 million).