Here's why T-Mobile wants you to get mad at the FCC

[Commentary] Recently, the CEO of T-Mobile sat down in front of a camera and tried to get people riled up about spectrum. The world of wireless spectrum can be dense and confusing, and unless you really need to, you probably wouldn't try to get people talking about it. But T-Mobile really needs to do it: the difference between getting spectrum and not getting spectrum could be the difference between competing with AT&T and Verizon and wasting away in third place. When T-Mobile talks about spectrum, it's talking about the airwaves used to connect your phone to its network. Broadly speaking, the more spectrum a carrier has, the better its network can be. Some spectrum is much, much better than other spectrum. "Sprint has all of this spectrum, but ... it doesn't travel very far and it gets stopped by wet leaves. Literally wet leaves," says Harold Feld, senior vice president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

T-Mobile wants to get people riled up because it and other carriers are going to have another chance to get more spectrum very soon. And not just any spectrum. The kind of spectrum you get once in a lifetime. The kind of spectrum you'd shell out huge sums of money for. An auction for this spectrum is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2016, but the rules for the auction will likely be finalized in July by the Federal Communications Commission. And that's why T-Mobile's CEO sat down to record a video. His company wants the FCC to make a big change before the rules are finalized. Right now, the FCC is setting aside a block, at most 30MHz in size, for companies that don't already own a large portion of good low-band spectrum in any given market — it's basically a safe haven from AT&T and Verizon. But T-Mobile, as well as a group of others including Sprint, Dish, and Public Knowledge, argue that 30MHz is too small.