Linda Hardesty

Steven Berry, CEO of the Competitive Carriers Association, said smaller carriers are happy, along with everyone else, that billions of dollars of government funding will be poured into closing the digital divide. But he stressed that bringing fiber to rural areas is not the same as bringing mobile. “Fiber to the home is not mobile,” said Berry. “The Biden administration is going to spend $42.5 billion on fiber to the home. Great.

The upcoming Auction 108 of 2.5 GHz spectrum is likely not going to raise a ton of money. But at least it will clean up the spectrum band, closing the many gaps where the spectrum is lying fallow and not being used at all. The auction will begin on July 29, 2022. While some auctions, such as the C-band auction held in 2021, aim to make billions of dollars to fill federal coffers, not all auctions are strictly focused on profit.

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 using its considerable legal muscle to try and prevent the terms of its 2.5 GHz spectrum leases from being revealed. This is particularly newsworthy right now because the Federal Communications Commission recently announced it would kick off the process for its Auction 108 in July 2022. Auction 108 is the auction of 2.5 GHz spectrum in the “white-space” gaps in the band that are currently lying fallow.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said that the company’s mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) service runs on “the best network.” Roberts was referring to the fact that Xfinity Wireless rides on Verizon’s network due to a wholesale agreement between the two companies. Roberts bragged that Comcast and Verizon recently updated their agreement to make improvements. The wholesale agreement specifies that Comcast can use its Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum to offload mobile traffic from Verizon’s network.

Joshua Edmonds, director of Digital Inclusion with the City of Detroit, said the city set up a program in 2019 called Connect 313 to help residents get access to broadband connectivity. The initial goal was “building a table for which everybody who was intersecting with the Digital Divide could sit. Whether that’s our telecom providers, residents, non-profits, community organizations, churches, big tech companies.” The program now has over 500 member organizations. The City of Detroit has done a number of things as part of Connect 313.

Dish Network has resolved its dispute with T-Mobile over the shut-down of T-Mobile’s 3G CDMA network. The parties have agreed that T-Mobile’s CDMA network will officially shut down on March 31—the same date that T-Mobile has been sticking to in the fight between the two carriers. The two carriers are working together to communicate to Boost customers who are still on the CDMA network and to help them obtain new handsets. In the short-term Dish expects some continued churn of Boost Mobile customers. 

Analysts at Evercore Research, led by Vijay Jayant, conducted proprietary research covering a random sample of 10,000 residential addresses across the US to determine the availability of Verizon’s and T-Mobile’s home internet services. They found that 39 percent of total households have T-Mobile Home Internet fixed wireless access (FWA) service available, while 15 percent of households have access to Verizon’s FWA product. The addresses in Evercore’s research were proportionately sampled by state and chosen to match US population distribution among urban, suburban and rural areas.

Both T-Mobile and Verizon have made quite a big deal about their new fixed wireless access (FWA) offerings. They’re tapping unused capacity on their nationwide wireless networks to offer FWA for home broadband. These offerings will help to provide broadband in underserved areas, and they also give T-Mobile and Verizon a means to steal share from wired telco and cable providers.

T-Mobile’s 2.5 GHz spectrum is not as locked down as most people might think it is. It turns out T-Mobile leases, but does not own, much of its 2.5 GHz spectrum. And at least one private investment firm is reaching out to the owners of the spectrum and making offers to buy it. T-Mobile is always bragging about its “layer-cake” spectrum position with a good combination of low-band, mid-band and high-band spectrum. It’s particularly prone to boast about its mid-band 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it inherited from Sprint.