WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission has kicked off the agency’s first spectrum auction in four years, an AWS-3 auction offering 200 5G-grade spectrum licenses that have lain fallow for more than a decade.
Bidding in the AWS-3 auction, formally designated as Auction 113, began the morning of June 2.
The auction involves spectrum licenses in the 1,695-1,710 MHz, 1,755-1,780 MHz, and 2,155-2,180 MHz bands and will offer more than 1.4 billion MHz-POPs (“Megahertz Population”) available for auction—a metric calculated by multiplying the bandwidth by the population covered by the licenses. The auction can be tracked here.
The licenses made available had been auctioned in 2014 for commercial use, but were the subject of defaults or bid withdrawals. As a result, these 200 licenses were not sold in the prior auction and the spectrum has remained unused in the FCC’s inventory ever since.
The license areas included in this auction are home to over 100 million consumers across 48 states, two U.S. territories and the Gulf of Mexico. They include major markets like New York, Chicago, Boston, Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C.
“Finally! The FCC is back in the game,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr enthused in a statement. “Spectrum auctions are the lifeblood of licensed wireless service, and it has been far too long since the FCC has run an auction. Today, we are kicking off a vitally important auction to pump more spectrum into the marketplace. There is a reason why the first item the Commission voted on at my first meeting as Chairman was to get the process going for this very auction. More spectrum means more building, lower prices, and stronger competition. The FCC’s Build America Agenda is restoring America’s leadership in wireless.”
The auction utilizes rules the FCC proposed and adopted last year. Procceeds will fund its Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program (commonly known as “rip and replace”), which seeks to remove untrustworthy technology from U.S. communications networks.
