This morning the auctioning of WiMAX frequency spectrum has been started and the Bundesnetzagentur also announced on their website the bidders:

• Clearwire Europe S.a.r.l.
• DBD Deutsche Breitband Dienste GmbH
• EWE TEL GmbH
• Inquam Broadband GmbH
• MGM Productions Group S.R.L
• Televersa Online GmbH

The most interesting parties are of course Clearwire, owned by Intel and Motorola and founded by Craig McCaw (before creating Clearwire, Craig McCaw founded McCaw Cellular – later purchased by AT&T Wireless), and then MGM Productions Group which is presumably MGM Corp owned. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) itself is owned by an investor consortium comprised of Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Sony Corporation of America, Comcast Corporation, DLJ Merchant Banking Partners and Quadrangle Group. So in short: private equity companies, Sony and Comcast. Money should be the least of the problems they face, one would think, but during the first day of the auction they were only bidding for one of the 28 areas - Bavaria - so I am a bit unclear what they really want here unless they wake up a bit later...

As a reminder, 3G spectrum was sold for a staggering total of 50bln EUR a few years ago. That madness we will not see with WiMAX, giving hope that providers will have money left over to roll out true high-speed mobile data services quickly.

• In Germany as in other European countries WiMAX spectrum (3.4 - 3.6 MHz) will be auctioned soon. On December 6 the German telecom regulator will announce the bidders. From originally more than 100, now only six seem to be left. Who exactly they are is unknown, with one exception: DBD, who has Intel as a strong backer, is among them. The current German mobile or fixed line operators are not bidding. This could mean that WiMAX spectrum will go for peanuts and subsequenty allow the winners to invest their money into true high speed mobile data networks. We will soon know if that is indeed true.
• One of the German Fraunhofer Institute's (government research facility that is about 50% sponsored by the tax payers and uses that money to subsidize its services and take away private companies' engineering jobs - just an aside from me!) has been granted a patent for watermarking digital (pictures and video) content. With this technique it is not possible anymore to remove the file ID without losing substantial quality. So it allows recognition of the digital content ownership. Of course it does not also prevent from copying/viewing - for that we still need encryption.
• The current Economist edition has an article on the future of NATO. It also contains a list of the total defence spending of each of its 26 members. The title is "America and the 25 dwarfs" and reflects on the fact that the US military spending is nearly double (472 bln USD) that of all the other 25 members combined (266 bln USD). What I also learned from this is that Iceland has no armed forces. So the total spending on military is 738 bln USD per year. Just think about that amount (it is billions, yes) for a second or two and don't start thinking what else could be done with it, because that could possibly take you forever.