Sat TV partnership bows out of bidding for airwaves

Steve Safran August 17th, 2006

EchoStar and DirectTV were interested in that FCC auction of airwaves that would have allowed them to get into the wireless broadband business. But they have dropped their joint bid effort, probably because the bidding got too high. After 20 rounds of bids, T-Mobile is the top bidder at $3 billion. When an offering gets too rich for the likes of satellite TV (combined with their partner Liberty Media), you have to think there may be bubble-like over-enthusiasm at play. (NYT free sub. req.)