Wireless Telecommunications

TracFone is the largest wireless reseller in the U.S., with about 21 million subscribers and prepaid brands including Straight Talk and Simple Mobile.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr is in Mississippi for events focused on his 5G jobs initiative, which centers on standing up community college and trade school programs so that Americans earn the skills needed to land good-paying jobs in the tower and telecommunication industries. Those programs have already been launched in SC, SD, NC, and OK. His visits will also focus on telehealth, infrastructure builds, and enhanced use of technology in K-12 classrooms.

SpaceX and Dish Network are fighting at the Federal Communications Commission over Dish's attempt to block a key designation that SpaceX's Starlink division needs in order to get FCC broadband funding. Dish's "baseless attempt" to block funding "would serve only to delay what matters most—connecting unserved Americans," said SpaceX in a filing.

A Q&A with Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. 

While you probably never thought you needed to understand the intricacies of how cellular networks operated by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon work, some big news that affects those operations will have real-world impacts on the services that they offer and that we rely on. In every country around the world except the US, 5G networks have been built around mid-band spectrum because it offers the right combination of coverage area and width of data lanes over which our TV shows can be streamed, Instagram posts uploaded, worldwide web browsed, etc.

The Federal Communications Commission announced the winning bidders and the final bid totals in Auction 107—commonly referred to as the C-band auction. Auction 107 net winning bids totaled $81,114,481,921 and gross winning bids totaled $81,168,677,645. Twenty-one bidders won all of the available 5,684 licenses. Verizon was the big winner -- nearly $45.5 billion spent to gain 3,511 licenses. AT&T was a distant second: nearly $23.5 billion spent on 1,621 licenses. T-Mobile spent $9.3 billion on 142 licenses. Down payments on the spectrum licenses are due March 10.

A flurry of orders, rulemakings, inquiries, and adjudications aimed at advancing the United States’ economic recovery and preparing for a post-COVID world.:

FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel shared with her colleagues a proposal to open a formal discussion on Open Radio Access Networks—sometimes called Open RAN—the opportunities they present, and what the FCC should be doing to promote the concept.

Federal Communications Commission Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel shared with her colleagues a draft Order that would make much-needed mid-band spectrum available for 5G. If adopted at the FCC’s March 17 Open Meeting, 100 megahertz of mid-band spectrum in the 3.45-3.55 GHz band would be made available for auction and 5G deployment across the contiguous United States.

We evaluate the impact of mobile operator mergers on the unit price of data and voice by using country-level observations on retail revenue for data, cellular data traffic, retail revenue for voice, and outgoing voice minutes. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we estimate the effect of operator merger by comparing the difference between the non-merging countries and the merging countries before and after the introduction of the operator merger.