The FCC this week issued to T-Mobile nine of the 2.5 GHz licenses that it won in Auction 108. The carrier plans to improve fixed wireless and cellular networks at about 11,000 mostly rural sites. As a condition of the award, the FCC required T-Mobile to divest roughly 20 MHz in Hawaii.
Even though T-Mobile had paid about $304 million at auction for 7,156 licenses, the FCC said it couldn’t issue them because the agency lost its auction authority when Congress failed to renew that last March. T-Mobile appealed to Congress for help.
Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) persuaded his colleagues to pass a bill requiring the FCC to issue licenses that have been won at auction on or before March 9, 2023, the date the Commission lost its auction authority. The bill requires the agency to issue the licenses by March 18 of this year, Inside Towers reported.
In issuing the licenses, the FCC rejected a petition to deny filed by AT&T. AT&T asserted that T-Mobile “engaged in an anticompetitive strategy to raise its rivals’ costs and harm consumers through undue spectrum aggregation.” The carrier further stated the agency should withhold any additional mid-band spectrum licenses from T-Mobile until it agrees to divest some of its licenses.
The FCC said this week, “based on the record before us and the applicable Commission precedent, we find that the grant of T-Mobile’s 2.5 GHz license application will serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity. Specifically, and in part based on the unique characteristics of the 2.5 GHz band and the specific licenses made available in Auction 108, we find that the grant of T-Mobile’s license application—subject to its voluntary divestiture commitment in parts of Hawaii that we impose as a condition—will promote the public interest by facilitating access to and use of the spectrum, particularly in rural areas where this band has been underutilized.”
The auction was completed in August of 2022. It raised a total of just over $419 million in net bids and $427.7 million in gross bids. Auction 108 ended with 63 bidders winning a total of 7,872 licenses. T-Mobile won 7,156 of those, according to the FCC.
By Leslie Stimson, Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief
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