Ziggo, Tele2 win Dutch mobile spectrum auction

* Ziggo, Tele2 made successful bids for 4 licences each

* KPN, Vodafone won 2 licences, T-Mobile 1 license

AMSTERDAM, April 22 (Reuters) - Privately owned cable company Ziggo and Sweden's Tele2 (TEL2b.ST) won a Dutch mobile spectrum auction on Thursday in the 2.6 GHz band, which will enable them to roll out mobile data networks.

Operators all over Europe need more spectrum to handle the explosion in data traffic crowding the airwaves as the use of mobile phones, laptops and other mobile devices rises.

New services such as mobile health applications and mobile commerce will also accelerate the demand for bandwidth.

The entry of the two new players to the Dutch market is not a big surprise, as the Dutch Economy Ministry had limited operators who were already active on the Dutch market to bidding on a maximum of 55 MHz of spectrum each.

Dutch telecoms group KPN (KPN.AS) and Vodafone (VOD.L) tried to get rid of the bidding limitation through the Dutch courts, but a Rotterdam judge ruled last week that the auction could proceed as planned.

Ziggo, which is owned by private equity firms Warburg Pincus [WP.UL] and Cinven [CINV.UL], successfully bid for 40 MHz in total of the 190 MHz which in total were available. Tele2 did the same.

The former Dutch telecoms monopoly KPN and Vodafone successfully bid for 20 MHz each, while Deutsche Telekom's (DTEGn.DE) T-Mobile acquired 10 MHz. The Dutch government will hold an additional auction that allows the companies to bid for specific sections of the bandwidth.

After that phase, proceeds from the auction will be disclosed. They are expected by analysts to be in the tens of millions of euros, a far cry from the almost 3 billion euros ($4.03 billion) a spectrum auction yielded a decade ago. (Reporting by Harro ten Wolde, editing by Will Waterman) ($1=.7439 Euro)