Competitive carriers warn FCC to learn from auction mistakes

As the Federal Communications Commission establishes the rules for its upcoming incentive spectrum auction, competitive carriers say they do not want to see a repeat of what happened with the 700MHz spectrum auction in 2008.

One problem that came to light after the auction was that the two largest carriers ended up with near-nationwide coverage in two separate and distinct slivers of spectrum within the 700MHz band. And these slivers of spectrum were not interoperable with spectrum that smaller providers bought in the auction. Going into the auction it was known that nationwide block of spectrum Verizon ended up with was not going to be compatible with smaller spectrum licenses in the lower portion of the 700 MHz band. But smaller carriers bidding on this spectrum expected that the licensed spectrum would interoperate with spectrum AT&T bought in an adjacent block. But after the auction, AT&T worked with a standards body to create its own separate band class that excluded the smaller players' spectrum because it claimed there were interference issues. The smaller carriers say this is just an excuse for AT&T to exclude them. And as a result, they say that they cannot get device and equipment makers to build gear necessary to deploy their network.