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T-Mobile owns county-sized mmWave spectrum licenses in many big US cities. But the company is now giving back some of that spectrum to the FCC while retaining only the small chunks that cover downtown areas.
T-Mobile has received the FCC's permission to give up some millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum that the operator said "is not feasible to effectively deploy ... in a way that would benefit the public."
In a handful of locations around the country, T-Mobile told the FCC that it does not plan to expand its mmWave coverage beyond relatively small downtown areas. As a result, the operator is giving back to the FCC spectrum that sits well beyond its existing coverage areas. The FCC can make the spectrum available to another provider that might want it.
The move means that T-Mobile will not meet the FCC's original coverage requirements for those spectrum licenses. Under the agency's original buildout requirements, T-Mobile was supposed to provide mobile services to at least 40% of the population within the geographic boundaries of its mmWave spectrum licenses or up to 25% of the geographic areas of the licenses.
Failing to meet the FCC's original coverage requirements could have been grounds for the agency to cancel T-Mobile's licenses altogether.
But T-Mobile told the FCC it would be better if the company simply redrew its spectrum licenses around its existing, smaller coverage areas, and the agency agreed.
T-Mobile calls its new, smaller spectrum licenses its "Retained Areas."
"Canceling T-Mobile's entire license because it has not met the specified performance requirements throughout its originally licensed area – when service is being provided to the Retained Areas – would not facilitate the Commission's goal of ensuring that the spectrum is being put to use. To the contrary, it would frustrate that goal because T-Mobile would be required to cease its operations in the Retained Areas," T-Mobile told the FCC in a filing earlier this year. T-Mobile said that it's "in the public interest for T-Mobile to retain its authorizations for the areas where it is providing service so that customers can continue to receive the robust level of communications that T-Mobile provides using the 28 GHz band."
Some longtime spectrum observers questioned what kind of precedent T-Mobile's move might set.
"It is an interesting tactic that I haven't seen before. Would the FCC accept this methodology on lowband or midband spectrum licenses?" wondered Brian Goemmer, with spectrum-tracking company Spektrum Metrics.
Highband, mmWave spectrum is not nearly as valuable as midband or lowband spectrum. That's because signals in mmWave spectrum can't travel as far as signals in midband and lowband spectrum.
Thus, the FCC's handling of the distinction could be important to players like Dish Network, the EchoStar company that has been struggling to expand its 5G network in order to meet the FCC's lowband and midband spectrum license coverage requirements.
Example: LA
The extent of T-Mobile's changes are clearly visible in Los Angeles. The original geographic scope of the company's 28GHz spectrum license there stretched from Burbank to Long Beach.
T-Mobile's original license is in blue and its "retained area" is in green.
But the company redrew its license to match its much smaller mmWave network in downtown LA. The newly redrawn license area meets the FCC's coverage requirements.
T-Mobile's new license covers only downtown LA.
T-Mobile argued that it would not have been able to expand its mmWave coverage across vast portions of the LA metropolitan area, as it would have had to do so under the requirements of its original license area.
"T-Mobile is using its 28 GHz band spectrum in venues like arenas and stadiums during widely attended events to ease network congestion," the operator explained to the FCC. "However, even in those scenarios, T-Mobile is unable to satisfy the performance requirements ... because the propagation characteristics of the spectrum only allow for stable communications over limited distances where there is a clear line of sight between the transmit and receive locations."
T-Mobile said it met the FCC's original coverage requirements on 12 of its 28GHz spectrum licenses. But in another 18 markets, it asked for and received permission from the FCC to redraw its licenses around its existing, smaller coverage areas.
Aside from LA, the other cities where T-Mobile made such changes include San Francisco and Santa Clara, California; Atlanta; Miami; Brooklyn, New York; and Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas.
The context
There is some precedent for this kind of transaction.
For example, when questioned about T-Mobile's request, an FCC official said the agency has approved similar requests from other companies. The official, who spoke with Light Reading on background and therefore declined to be named, pointed to a 2013 request by Fixed Wireless Holdings – a Sprint entity at that time – to shed parts of its license in Anchorage, Alaska.
Similarly, the agency has allowed some Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) winners to reshape their required coverage areas.
Investment banker Michael Alcamo, who works with companies on their spectrum licenses, said he routinely sees companies asking for extensions or waivers. Under such requests, companies can ask for more time to meet their buildout requirements. Indeed, EchoStar's Dish recently asked for and received that kind of waiver from the FCC.
But Alcamo said he hasn't seen a request quite like T-Mobile's, where a company returned portions of its spectrum licenses in areas where it's difficult to build service.
"It was an innovative request, and the FCC agreed with the public interest analysis," Alcamo told Light Reading. "I would not be surprised if other licensees ask for a similar approach to the buildout rules, which can be challenging for millimeter wave spectrum in less densely populated areas."
Goemmer, the executive with Spektrum Metrics, largely agreed. "That spectrum was going to languish," he said, explaining that T-Mobile's move could allow another company to make use of spectrum that the operator had no intention of using.
Goemmer wondered how other big 5G operators – particularly those with mmWave spectrum holdings – might approach their own FCC buildout requirements.
After all, wireless network operators typically closely guard their spectrum license holdings. For example, Verizon recently agreed to buy some of UScellular's lowband spectrum holdings for $1 billion. Giving up spectrum, without any financial payback, is unheard of in these kinds of transactions.
The mmWave conundrum
T-Mobile, for its part, has long taken a dismissive approach toward 5G in mmWave spectrum.
"I'll ... take you back to '17 and '18, when the world was absolutely convinced that 5G would equal rollouts of millimeter wave technologies all across this country," T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said during a recent T-Mobile investor event. "Millimeter wave technology was synonymous with 5G if you look back and remember. ... And we looked at it and said, 'that is not how 5G is going to be won and lost.'"
Instead, T-Mobile has focused on the midband 2.5GHz spectrum it acquired from Sprint.
Millimeter wave spectrum bands generally sit above 20GHz – far above the spectrum bands traditionally used for cellular operations. 5G technology initially promised to support high-speed mobile operations in the mmWave spectrum bands, thus allowing operators to raise their peak network speeds from around 100 Mbit/s to above 1 Gbit/s.
But there's a catch: Transmissions in mmWave spectrum can't travel more than a few thousand feet, and often cannot penetrate glass or trees. Meantime, transmissions in traditional, lowband cellular spectrum bands – such as 800MHz or 1900MHz – can often travel miles and reach deep inside buildings.
That's why T-Mobile is willing to relinquish large portions of its mmWave spectrum licenses. Covering large geographic areas like the LA metropolitan area would likely require thousands of expensive transmission sites.
US operator interest in mmWave spectrum mostly ended in 2021 after AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile collectively spent almost $100 billion on midband C-band spectrum. Such spectrum sits between lowband and highband, mmWave spectrum, and it can cover wide geographic areas with speedy connections.
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