Today the fourth round of bidding is scheduled for the Federal Communications Commission auction for the 700MHz spectrum. High bids totaled $3.2 billion, which is significantly less than the $10 billion Congress and the FCC expect to raise in the auction, which opened Thursday. The second round of bidding reached $2.78 billion and the third $3.2 billion.

Partially responsible for the lower than expected bids could be the market decline, which prevented many potential bidders from offering as much as they intended in the first place. This could result in a shortage of $2-3 billion from the initial projections.

The auction is expected to continue within the next weeks or perhaps months, and will be declared closed when no further bids will be submitted. The bid rounds will continue daily and all five blocks will remain available for sale. FCC will publicly announce the results on their web site, approximately 10 minutes after the bids are close for the day.

Until that time, the identity of the companies involved in the bid will not be unveiled. Among the names expected to participate are first of all AT&T Inc and Verizon Wireless, and possibly Google Inc, EchoStar Communications Corp and Cablevision Systems Corp.

Prominent wireless startup company Frontline Wireless LLC has bailed out of the FCC auction for the 700MHz spectrum earlier this month. Frontline was supposed to come up with an upfront payment for the wireless chunk it wanted, a special section of the 700MHz spectrum, the Block D, which was set aside for an emergency communications network. Frontline was the main planner behind the concept of a nationwide communications system which would include the newly freed up frequencies.

The auction will actually cover the 698-806 MHz part of the wireless spectrum. The public safety network was supposed to run on a total of 10 megahertz (763-768 and 793-798 MHz), making up the so-called Block D of the auctioned spectrum.

The FCC three months ago rejected again heavy pressure from those "wireless cartels" (as described by former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Reed Hundt) and said it won't budge on the rules it announced for the 700 MHz spectrum. Specifically, the FCC requires winning bidders for a certain portion of the 700 MHz spectrum called the "C-block" open up their services to their customers' choice of equipment.