Behind the Scenes with CAP & COFETEL, take 1

With Mexico’s Auctions 20+21 closed and the winners revealed, I thought it would be interesting to share some behind the scenes details of delivering Mexico’s auction solution.  Between the summer of 2009 and spring of 2010, the Computech and COFETEL international partnership relied on taking turns traveling between Washington D.C. and la ciudad de Mexico.  Over the next series of entries, I’ll be walking you through various aspects of supporting the auction lifecycle.  On tap today – spectrum caps.

In June (’09), COFETEL’s auctions stakeholders & subject matter experts spent a week in our Bethesda offices discussing the intricacies that Auctions 20+21 had in store.  Together, we compared and contrasted U.S. & Mexico spectrum policies to hash out system requirements.  Soon thereafter, our team crossed the border with an initial set of system requirements and wireframes to present to our COFETEL partners.  Much of this trip revolved around spectrum caps – logic, levels, and logistics.

One key element of incorporating spectrum caps into CAP (our auction platform), related to the concurrent nature of Auctions 20 + 21 (i.e. the auctions were run in a parallel fashion by alternating rounds).  Therefore, in order to handle spectrum caps that comprised both auctions, we implemented spectrum caps at an auction-level as well as a region-level. In this way, the system tracked a company’s MHz holdings within a distinct auction (i.e. bidding in 20 or 21), as well as across both auctions (i.e. bidding in 20 and 21).

Based on spectrum cap levels set by Mexico’s Federal Competition Commission (COFECO), CAP effectively restricted bidding by notifying bidders in real-time in the case of ineligible bids due to these caps.  Additionally, CAP provided a Spectrum Cap Report, which disclosed bidder-specific spectrum information by geographic region (1-9 for Mexico).  End result?  The Nextel-Televisa consortium entered the nationwide market with a winning bid on a 30 MHz block of spectrum, and spectrum caps effectively introduced (or limited, depending on your perspective) competition into the nationwide market for Mexico.  I know cases can be made for the +’s & -‘s of each side, but I’ll save that debate for another day.

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Sarah Miller is a member of  Computech’s Auction Practice.  She specializes in auction system design and implementation and is the lead Business Analyst for the Computech Auction Platform (CAP).


Posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 6:05 pm and is filed under News, Online Auctions, spectrum management.

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