AT&T has told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it would have to seriously re-evaluate its participation in next year’s 600 MHz auction if the regulator does not change proposed restrictions on how much spectrum it can buy. The…
AT&T has told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it would have to seriously re-evaluate its participation in next year’s 600 MHz auction if the regulator does not change proposed restrictions on how much spectrum it can buy.
The incentive auction will see spectrum transferred from broadcasters to mobile operators in a complex process whereby the frequencies will be acquired by the FCC, then repacked and sold on to telcos.
Under the plans to sell-off the airwaves the FCC wants to reserve a certain amount of MHz in each market so that operators which don’t have significant reserves of low-band spectrum can acquire licences, thus restricting other operators.
It would aid Sprint Corp and T-Mobile US, America’s third and fourth largest operators respectively, to bolster their stocks of valuable low-band spectrum – the most efficient frequencies for deploying LTE. The process is designed to boost their competitive position against the big two: AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
In a letter to the FCC, AT&T’s vice president of federal regulatory, Joan Marsh, said that if the proposal is adopted AT&T would be restricted in markets covering 70% of the US population.
She said that in these markets only one restricted bidder could come away with a 10×10 MHz block, which the Dallas-based telco said is “necessary to achieve minimal economic and technical efficiencies in an LTE deployment”.
Marsh argued that this would limit AT&T, and Verizon, to obtaining a “fragmented, uneconomic and inefficient 600 MHz footprint”.
She said AT&T could accept the terms of the auction and buy an inefficient footprint, or it could choose to sit out of the auction entirely and direct its capital and resources towards other spectrum opportunities.
Observers have described the auction as the defining event of Tom Wheeler’s tenure as chair of the FCC. Last year Wheeler commented: “I have often defined the complexity of this multi-part simultaneous process as being like a Rubik’s cube.”
Last December Wheeler pushed the auction back from this year to 2015 citing technical issues around the frequencies and the complex auction process.
