The Priority Access License auction for the Citizens Broadband Radio Service spectrum begins today with a single, six-hour bidding period.
There are 271 qualified bidders participating in Auction 105, ranging from Tier 1 mobile network operators and cable companies to wireless internet service providers, electric utilities, universities and a few large enterprises. It is the first major auction of midband spectrum in the U.S. which could be used for 5G services, offering the most licenses ever in an FCC auction:22,631 licenses, or seven in each U.S. county-based license area. Comparatively, the four recent millimeter wave auctions which the FCC has held each had 40 or fewer qualified bidders.
Each PAL will consist of a 10 megahertz unpaired channel at 3.55-3.65 GHz. Entities can bid on up to four PALs per license area and aggregate those. The PAL auction is scheduled to continue tomorrow with two, two-hour bidding rounds.
The three tiers of the CBRS spectrum-sharing framework ensure that even with 70 megahertz of the 150 megahertz band devoted to PALs, there are still 80 MHz of the band that can be accessed under the General Authorized Access tier. The FCC has build-out requirements for PAL holders, but has also instituted use-it-or-share-it rules for the band — meaning that until a PAL licensee is actually transmitting in the band in a specific geography, the spectrum can be assigned to GAA users. Any PALs that ultimately are not sold will be available for GAA use. The FCC gave the go-ahead for commercial use of the band under GAA use in January, and there are already an estimated 25,000 small cell sites activated in the band, primarily for capacity augmentation for mobile network operators and fixed wireless access service for WISPs.
The starting prices for county-level licenses range from $1,000 in most of the country, to $1.964 million for Los Angeles county, the most populous in the country at 9.8 million people.
The 10 counties with the highest starting prices for a PAL include:
- Los Angeles county, California: $1.964 million; population 9.8 million
- Cook county, Illinois: $1.039 million; population 5.2 million
- Harris County, Texas: $818,000; population: 4.1 million
- San Diego county, California: $763,000; population 3.1 million
- Orange county, California: $619,000; population 3.0 million
- Kings county, New York: $602,000; population 2.5 million
- Miami-Dade county, Florida: $501,000; population 2.49 million
- Dallas county, Texas: $499,000; population 2.4 million
- Queens county, New York: $474,000; population 2.2 million
- Riverside county, California: $446,000; population 2.19 million
Looking for more information on CBRS? Keep an eye out for RCR’s upcoming special report on CBRS and join us for next week’s CBRS webinar, featuring Federated Wireless.
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