What to make of the FCC’s latest airwave auction delay

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission has once again delayed an unprecedented auction of wireless airwaves that was supposed to be happening in 2015. Now that sale is being pushed to 2016, at the earliest. What gives?

"I think it was inevitable that the commission was going to push back the auction from its mid-2015 target," said Paul Gallant, a telecom analyst at Guggenheim Securities. "There are just incredibly difficult things that need to be done to make this work. It's hard to overstate how different this auction is from prior auctions." This is a complicated, technical process, one that involves setting up all-new computer algorithms that can award money to TV broadcasters interested in trading their spectrum for cash while also selling that same spectrum to wireless carriers. All kinds of decisions need to be made about how the auction will be run before that software can even be written.