auction Archives - trefor.net

How do you cram a debate on the future of mobile services, data roaming and spectrum into an hour and a half? At last night’s Digital Economy All Party Political Group at Portcullis House in Westminster we made a pretty good job of it with a panel consisting of Hugh Davies, Director of Corporate Affairs for mobile network 3,Brian Williamson of Plum Consulting, Ruy Pinto of Inmarsat and Raj Sivalingham of Intellect.

This debate was hot on the heels of last week’s successful back bench motion by Rory Stewart, MP (Penrith and Cumbria) which called upon Ofcom to specify 98% mobile broadband coverage in the 4G auction in 2012.

3 stated that this is doable with existing base station infrastructure provided they received suitable low frequency spectrum allocation in the auction. O2 and Vodafone have already been reallocated spectrum out of their existing 900 and 1800MHz 3G licenses.

Nortel has set February 25th as the date for the auction of CVAS, the jewel in its crown. The acronym stands for Carrier VoIP Applications Solutions and is basically the world leading Nortel carrier division.

The current bid in from GENBAND is a low US$282 million. This however is just a starter with the end point expected to be much higher by the end of the bidding process. There are apparently 6 or 7 runners with three of them being serious.

This will either be the end of the beginning, beginning of the end or some other combination of beginnings and ends that will bring the bankruptcy process to a close. I’m not sure what happens to the Nortel brand name – Avaya seem to be continuing to use it in conjunction with the Enterprise PBX division they bought in a similar auction process. What I do hope is that the name CVAS is immediately dispensed with. Presumably the name was the last act of someone who has subsequently left the company.