FCC hands T-Mobile the 2.5 GHz auction it always wanted

The Federal Communications Commission announced that July 29, 2022, will be the start of bidding in Auction 108 for 2.5 GHz licenses. This auction will be for “white-spaces” of the 2.5 GHz band where no one owns the spectrum. T-Mobile is particularly interested in Auction 108 because it already owns or leases much of the 2.5 GHz spectrum across the United States, and it wants to fill in the gaps in its coverage. The auction will offer about 8,000 new county-based overlay licenses. “T-Mobile is likely to be the major winner, as the auction will allow the company to fix the ‘Swiss Cheese’ problem its 2.5 GHz network grid is known to suffer from,” said New Street Research policy analyst Blair Levin. The FCC has decided to grant T-Mobile the things it wanted for this auction. First, the FCC is expediting the auction. Even though Verizon and AT&T have complained they can’t make informed bidding decisions unless they know some of the terms of T-Mobile’s existing 2.5 GHz leases with schools across the country, the FCC is moving forward quickly without making any public ruling on Verizon’s and AT&T’s request for lease information. Secondly, the FCC announced that Auction 108 will use an “ascending clock” auction format. This is the type of auction that T-Mobile wanted. Some potential bidders had wanted a single, sealed-bid auction because T-Mobile has so much more information about the spectrum. But the ascending clock auction will allow T-Mobile to more precisely target its bids.