Earlier this month it was disclosed that the final auction for the 700 MHz spectrum had made it all the way up to $19.5 billion, greatly surpassing the $10 billion to $15 billion the FCC had forecasted. It wasn't until yesterday that the big winners were announced, namely Verizon and AT&T who will be getting a few hundred licenses worth billions of dollars after 261 bidding rounds. The companies will use the airwaves to enhance their already large voice and data services, as well as unleash a new wave of wireless technologies that could need that kind of capacity. A third possible victor is Dish Network's parent company EchoStar, who got themselves 168 licenses for a bit over $711 million.

It had been speculated that Google at some point also entered the auction which created a massive wave of rumors on the web, but at the end the search giant didn't do away with anything as was outbid by the large communication companies.