A major chunk of repurposed former television spectrum is going to telco giant AT&T in a 2.5B deal with Aloha Partners. The high quality beachfront spectrum covers "196M people in 281 markets…including 72 of the top 100 and all of the top 10 markets in the United States." AT&T intends to use the capacity to meet increasing demand for mobile services, "including voice, data and video," said AT&T’s Forrest Miller. Aloha has been amassing the spectrum for several years, both via auction and acquisition. It recently bought a large chunk of it from LIN Television, which itself benefited from some nice ROI after acquiring pieces of the spectrum at auction in 2002 and 2003. The spectrum covers the space once allocated for UHF channels 54 through 59.
