FRANKFURT: Germany has received bids of 5.08 billion euros ($5.75 billion) from Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica Deutschland and Vodafone for radio frequencies that can be used by mobile phone

operators.

The rival companies are bidding for new blocks of airwaves to satisfy growing consumer demand for streaming video and other data-consuming applications via 4G technology.

Vodafone bid the highest with a sum of 2.1 billion euros, followed by Deutsche Telekom with 1.8 billion and Telefonica Deutschland with 1.2 billion, the German telecoms regulator said. It will give further details at a news conference at 1500 GMT on Friday.

Analysts had expected the auction to raise a maximum of 4-5 5 billion euros. That is a far cry from the 50.8 billion euros the government raised in an auction in 2000 for new 3G network licenses, when there were six groups bidding.

Analysts said that the prices were low compared to what operators paid in a similar auction in the United States.

Germany started the auction three weeks ago, setting a floor of 1.5 billion euros. The bidding went through 181 rounds and Mspread over 16 days.

The German government has earmarked part of the auction proceeds to help develop a fast fixed-line broadband network.

On Monday European Union state aid regulators approved a 3-billion-euro support scheme to roll out faster Internet in Germany.

"5 billion is a small fraction of the valuation of this spectrum mix based on the US auction outcome, normalized for German population," said Antonios Drossos co-founder of Finnish telecoms advisory firm Rewheel.

Earlier this year the US Federal Communications Commission raised a record $44.9 billion or $2.21 per MHz per person in an auction of so-called AWS-3 airwaves, the highest point yet in

the wireless industry's demand for spectrum.

The German auction yielded only around 0.21 euros per MHz per person in the country of 80 million. That is below the 0.26 euros per MHz per person that was paid in Italy's 2011 auction.

The German auction was the first in Europe to include the low-frequency 700 megahertz (MHz) band formerly used to carry the analogue signals of regional television stations.

These wavebands have longer reach and deeper penetration into buildings than the higher frequencies currently used by mobile network operators. Auction winners will have to promise

there will be almost no "black holes" in network coverage.

France on Friday set a minimum price of 416 million euros for each of six blocks of 700 MHz spectrum, which will be put on auction before the end of the year.