FCC announces bidders for January radio spectrum auction

The FCC released a bidder list this week for its upcoming radio bandwidth auctions to be held in late January. These FCC radio auctions have attracted a wide assortment of companies that previously have had little to no presence in the wireless business. Among those companies are Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) -- whose wireless ambitions are still clouded in secrecy -- and Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM).

Qualcomm is an interesting participant, since it already owns a decent chunk of radio waves in the 700 MHz area, where it operates the little-known MediaFLO wireless television service, and it secured the radio frequency currently used by analog television channel 55 as well. Does Qualcomm want wireless carriers to build phones that will "listen" to its upcoming wireless television channels? Most likely, although the company's effort is still in its infancy.

Charlie Ergen's EchoStar (NASDAQ: DISH) may want to get into the FCC auction as well, after pulling out of another FCC auction in 2006 when the bids became inflated beyond what it wanted to pay. Does EchoStar want to compete with established telephone companies like AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) to bring telecom services directly to customers? That's the going theory since wireless is quite a bit cheaper than installing fiber optic lines all over the country.

All in all, the FCC released a list of 266 companies that had applied to bid on next month's radio auctions on radio frequencies that will be vacated when analog television signals end in 2009.