“To be clear, the winners here will be large companies that will foreclose meaningful opportunities for rural small businesses to compete for mid-band spectrum, which is critically important for them to deliver broadband services to millions of rural Americans that do not have access to 25/3Mbps broadband service in their homes, farms, and businesses,” Aiken also wrote.
Big carriers petitioned FCC
Pai moved ahead with his proposal last week despite pleas from small ISPs, including one from his hometown of Parsons, Kansas.
The FCC received petitions to increase the license area size from T-Mobile and CTIA, the trade group that represents T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. AT&T and Verizon separately urged the FCC to increase the license area sizes.
Pai didn’t go quite as far as the big carriers hoped, though. T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon asked the FCC to auction licenses in Partial Economic Areas (PEAs), of which there are just 416 nationwide, including 62 with at least 1 million people each.
Pai’s proposal describes county-sized licenses as a middle-ground approach that will allow carriers to use the 3.5GHz band for 5G mobile services. Using census tracts “would cause significant difficulties in deployment of large-scale networks for mobile 5G use,” Pai’s proposed order says. “[W]e find that increasing the size of… license areas to counties is more likely to ensure that mobile 5G deployments are feasible in the 3.5 GHz band.”
The FCC also said smaller license areas would be more complex for carriers to manage. The FCC proposal notes that AT&T said it would have to “severely limit” the power of radios near border areas, and T-Mobile told the FCC “that synchronization of uplink and downlink operations with neighbors ‘would be almost impossible to implement’ in census tracts in large urban areas.”
“Further, as T-Mobile explains, the smaller the license area, the more the interference protection requirements will limit a licensee’s ability to use its assigned spectrum throughout its service area,” the FCC wrote.
The FCC also wrote that county-sized license areas will help carriers “take advantage of economies of scale, which will reduce deployment costs.”