The 700-MHz Auction Is Decadent and Delayed

After nine days of nail-biting excitement, the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of the 700 MHz spectrum is beginning to wind down.”

I wrote that over a month ago, and boy was I wrong. Though the FCC is clearly keen to end it, the auction continues to drag on with cellphone companies fighting it out over niggling little bits of 12-megahertz B-Block spectrum in Albany, Ga., Yuba City and Imperial, Calif., Ashtabula, Ohio and Hunterdon, N.J. Apparently, pushing the clocks ahead an hour this past weekend didn’t do much good.

With bidding appearing to have entered the final stretch, the auction has raised nearly $20 billion, double the sum for which the FCC had hoped. Stifel Nicolaus analysts Blair Levin and Rebecca Arbogast predict it will end this week with Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) coming out as the auction’s biggest winners, and Google (GOOG) as a “willing loser.”