After Day Three, AWS-3 Re-Auction Bids Total $95 Million
If the auction brings in less than $2.9 billion, EchoStar is on the hook for the shortfall
WASHINGTON, June 5, 2026 — After three days, total bidding in the government’s first spectrum auction in years sat at about $95 million Friday morning.
That’s still a far cry from the $3.4 billion Dish paid for the AWS-3 licenses before returning them to the Federal Communications Commission. Analysts agreed the auction was getting off to a slow start, but also said there’s a long way to go before it closes.
The auction will continue each business day until bidding stops. Four additional rounds are slated for Friday, the first of which began at 10 am and brought in an additional roughly $8 million.
“We are still in the early rounds and bidding will pick up. In recent spectrum auctions, final round bids have been orders of magnitude higher than the bids in round 1,” New Street Research analyst David Barden wrote in an investor note Thursday. The round one bids were about $50 million in the AWS-3 auction Tuesday.
Barden noted that if the AWS-3 re-auction final proceeds increased by the same amount as the lower C-band auction compared to its first round, the re-auction would bring in $2.3 billion. He wrote the lower C-band auction had the FCC’s largest ever increase in bids from the first to final rounds.
Dish-owner EchoStar is on the hook for any shortfall if the auction fetches less than $2.9 billion — the company has already paid about $500 million — so it will be hoping bids ultimately exceed Barden’s estimate, something the analyst wrote he thought was possible.
There were still 39 licenses without any bids at the end of Thursday, the same as the end of day one. Most of the value in the licenses up for auction is concentrated in four licenses covering Boston, New York City, and two markets in Chicago.
The licenses with four bidders after them dropped to 12 from 14, and the licenses with three competing bidders dropped to 22 from 36.
“The key thing to watch right now is how sticky demand is (how quickly bidders pull ‘chips’ off the board as prices rise between rounds),” BNP Paribas senior analyst Sam McHugh wrote in an investor note Thursday. “While demand is clearly sticky (almost unmoving) at the moment, the increase in license prices between rounds is small in absolute dollar terms.”
Who’s bidding?
There have consistently been four bidders on the four most valuable licenses, although one bidder dropped out of the Boston license Thursday. In New Street’s view, the bidders are likely to be the big three mobile carriers plus EchoStar. EchoStar, which is decommissioning its mobile network and looking to sell all the licenses it currently owns, still has an interest in driving up bids to avoid a shortfall payment.
“We have seen speculation that not all of the big 3 wireless carriers are bidding and that the other major bidders are Echostar and SpaceX. We think that’s plausible but highly unlikely,” Barden wrote. “We can’t think of a reason why any of the big 3 carriers might not be bidding.”
The carriers have already deployed infrastructure that can use the spectrum up for grabs, he wrote, meaning they could put the airwaves to use quickly and cheaply.
SpaceX, which registered to participate in the auction, was unlikely to be placing many bids because it would need as many licenses as possible if it were looking to compete with the mobile carriers, in New Street’s view. The 39 licenses with no demand so far indicate no party is bidding that way, according to Barden.
McHugh wrote in a Friday note that at one point Thursday there were five total bidders for one of the Chicago licenses, before one of the parties moved their bidding units back to smaller markets.
“We did find it interesting that there were — if only for a moment — five bidders in one of the three largest markets,” he wrote. “In other words, the view that there are only four well-capitalized bidders in the auction may well not be right.”
