US mmWave Spectrum Auction Results in 24 GHz & 28 GHz

Fortune reported:

The federal government’s latest auction of airwave rights that can be used for super-fast 5G mobile phone service brought in only $2.7 billion, a fraction of the amounts raised in earlier sales for 3G and 4G airwaves.

AT&T and T-Mobile were the top bidders, with each spending almost $1 billion for rights in the 24 GHz and 28 GHz bands, the Federal Communications Commission said on Monday. Verizon, which already owned a considerable amount of airwaves in the 28 GHz band before the auction, spent $521 million.

Meanwhile, United States Cellular spent $256 million, Boston-based wireless broadband startup Starry spent $48 million, and data carrier Windstream spent $27 million. The auction didn’t draw any bids from cable companies and big tech players that have previously shown an interest in wireless.

The total was far less than the $20 billion to $45 billion that the wireless industry spent each at auctions over the past decade covering airwaves in the 600 MHz, 700 MHz, and 1700 MHz bands. Sometimes referred to as the millimeter wave bands, the high frequency airwaves sold at the latest auction can carry a tremendous amount of data, but they don’t travel nearly as far as lower frequency bands and can be blocked easily by buildings and trees.

FCC website:

• Winning Bidders Announced for Auction of 28 GHz Upper Microwave Flexible Use Service Licenses (Auction 101)

• Auction of 24 GHz Upper Microwave Flexible Use Service Licenses Closes; Winning Bidders Announced for Auction 102

Tables from Light Reading Article here.

Pie charts at the top from Allnet Blog post here.


Related Posts:

• New Tutorial on 5G Spectrum

T-Mobile, USA: 5G, LAA & Small Cells

T-Mobile has a bold vision of providing nationwide 5G network. They have 600 MHz band available which can provide them with a nationwide 5G coverage layer but would that be enough? I have done some analysis on this topic on 3G4G blog here. They have a nice video on their 5G vision as shown below:



Recently they have also deployed a 5G tech truck to bring these benefits to end users.

According to TmoNews:

The T-Mobile Tech Truck hit the road today, beginning a journey that’ll take it across the country to help people experience the benefits of 5G as well as other tech being developed by T-Mobile. The exhibit will include connected drones, interactive displays to show how smart cities will become cleaner and more efficient, and AR and VR experiences that T-Mo says will improve how we communicate.


In addition to 5G, T-Mobile has been deploying small cells with LAA or License Assisted Access. This is helping them reach Gigabit LTE.

With Verizon and AT&T working towards 5G in high throughput mmWave band both T-Mobile and Sprint can differentiate themselves with nationwide 5G. In fact this is the main value proposition for T-Mo and Sprint merger, that they complement each other with regards to 5G bands and if they merge than US could be 5G leader.

Source: ZDnet

We will have to wait and see who wins the 5G race in the USA.

Related Posts:

• 3G4G Blog: Minimum Bandwidth Requirement for 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) Deployment
• 3G4G Small Cells Blog: T-Mobile USA is deploying 25K small cells with LAA
• 3G4G Small Cells Blog: Some pictures of Small Cells from California (USA)
• 3G4G Small Cells Blog: T-Mobile USA Small Cells - backhauled via dark fiber

AT&T and Verizon are now tied for the rank of largest U.S. mobile carrier

Who leads the U.S. in mobile subscribers? According to mobile analyst Chetan Sharma, it’s now a neck-and-neck race between AT&T and Verizon who collectively controls 68 percent of the market.

At the end of March, AT&T had 116 million total connections, but that number includes all of its wholesale subscribers (those that connect with one of AT&T’s mobile virtual network operator partners) and machine-to-machine links attached to cars, gadgets and other devices in the internet of things. Verizon doesn’t report any of those numbers. It only reveals business and consumer retail subscribers buying their service directly from Verizon. That number totaled 103 million.

If you only factored in AT&T’s retail prepaid and postpaid customers you would get 85.1 million, but AT&T has a substantially larger wholesale business Verizon. So by Sharma’s calculations just as many people are connecting their phones and tablets and hotspots to AT&T’s network as Verizon.

Any way you look at it, these two carriers are huge. They collected control 68 percent of the U.S. wireless market. It’s also interesting to note that if Sprint were to merge with T-Mobile – as Sprint’s new chairman Masayoshi Son is so keen on doing– the two would hold a combined 30 percent of the U.S. mobile market.

That’s still smaller than either Big Red or Ma Bell, but definitely qualifies as a mega-carrier. And it doesn’t leave much room for the other guys. The 125 or so regional and rural carriers in the U.S. accounted for a meager 2 percent of all mobile subscriptions.

Source

US Wireless Market Trends Q1 2014