Category: Path Forward

So for the second time, the FCC has stopped updating my data source (the first time was the Spectrum Dashboard, and then I rewrote my scripts to parse the License View data dump).

I’m loathe to rewrite it for a third time (using the direct data dumps from the ULS) mostly because I’m too busy. With 50 hour work weeks becoming more frequent, a wife, and friends I don’t get to see much, I don’t have a lot of free time anymore (when I first wrote this, I was single, all my friends were married, and had tremendous amounts of free time). Its one thing to fire up a python script once every two weeks to download and update the data from the FCC, its another thing to have to dedicate 100+ hours to rewrite the back end from scratch (data processing, cleanup, normalization, store into a DB, generate static data files).

So I think this might be the end, if the FCC doesn’t update the License View dataset ever again. I could care less about their Spectrum Dashboard, that was a difficult tool to use productively. But the raw License View data was much easier to ingest and process – its way more valuable to the community. Lets hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears.

I published this via twitter a week or two ago, and now I’ve cleaned it up and am publishing it here. In general terms, I expect Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to each own about 40-50MHz in the AWS-1/3 combined spectrum “superband” after the auction closes. This, after some deals between the three of them to reorganize the spectrum so its contiguous, will allow each of them to deliver end-user speeds of 15-25Mbps in areas of good coverage.

[Update 3/31/2014: Updated to reflect FCC’s band plan for AWS-3, also tweaked the results slightly to accommodate the new band plan]

Combined with lower band 600 and 700 MHz spectrum, along with refarming of PCS 1900MHz spectrum over the next 5 years, LTE coverage should be greatly improved in terms of speed and capacity.

What is left to determine is how end-user usage patterns will change when they have access to higher speeds – will they need to move up from a 10GB bucket to a 15GB bucket for their family of four lines, or will users keep their habits in check and the carriers are left with an overbuilt network because people aren’t streaming video for fear of data overages?

Disclaimer: let me say I’m against the merger today. However if it were to happen, this is how it should happen.

First, T-Mobile should be allowed to succeed for fail on its own. Its fourth quarter numbers weren’t great. If T-Mo can turn it around on their own and become profitable in the US and they don’t need to be bought out, then great. If they cant, and we get to the point where the US market has proven that it cant sustain four profitable, healthy carrier networks, then T-Mobile and Sprint should be allowed to merge. But this means giving T-Mobile time to fix and market themselves.

In the same vein, Sprint should be allowed to fix themselves and open themselves to other opportunities. Masayoshi Son said recently about offering wire-line replacement at speeds of 200Mbit/s using 2.5GHz BRS/EBS spectrum.

I’m guessing we wont be able to make this judgment on whether current actions will turn around both companies until late 2016 or 2017. So any merger shouldn’t be allowed until then.

By then, what would a Sprint/T-Mobile merger look like? Probably a lot easier than what it would take in 2014 or 2015. Most notably, omni-band phones would allow Sprint to push most of its consumer and business customers over to T-Mobile’s faster GSM/LTE network rather easily and quickly.

T-Mobile will have some 700-A spectrum assets to leverage for better LTE coverage, as well as upcoming 600MHz band assets as well. They’ll have likely rounded out their AWS spectrum with spectrum from the AWS-3 auction to ensure 20+20 LTE in the top 50 markets (they only need 10MHz in many markets, 20MHz in a few markets). There will also be opportunities post-auction to rebalance spectrum assets from market to market, as Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T look to rebalance their spectrum block between markets such that they own continuous blocks of spectrum – in most cases, Verizon will occupy the lower 40MHz (A&B), T-Mobile the middle 40/50 (C, D, E and F), and AT&T the upper 40/50 (future blocks in the AWS-3 auction).

Sprint will offer supplemental LTE with their 2.5GHz small cells to provide higher capacity and speeds in dense metro areas. Sprint’s legacy CDMA will have to stick around a long while for M2M customers, but they could start refarming CDMA capacity in the PCS band for additional LTE.

From a technology standpoint, waiting another two years down the road makes it easier. But will the owners of T-Mobile and Sprint want to wait that long? I think they’d like to go right now. Its up to the FCC and DOJ to make sure that we have four viable carriers in the marketplace until the marketplace proves definitively that its not going to work.

In order to update my Spectrum Map, I use data from the FCC Spectrum Dashboard (its helpful CSV export functions). Unfortunately, we’ve gone two months now where the FCC hasn’t updated it. And I don’t know if they will resume them.

If I want to keep the Spectrum Mapper going, I’ll have to figure out a way to get at the same sort of FCC data I had before. Raw license data is easy (kind of) – they have a way to download the entire license database into a 10GB text file (1GB ZIP file). I have a python script already that will go through and pull out all the cellular license data. But the issue from there is it doesn’t come with population-specific information on geographically disaggregated licenses (when two or more companies split a geographic area into smaller parts) and no county-level data (which is what I was using as the basis in my system). The FCC ULS has county level data, but I don’t feel comfortable screen scraping the FCC’s website, lest they call it “unauthorized access” and threaten to throw me in jail for 30 years like Aaron Schwartz.

So for now I’m stuck. Even if I figured out a solution, I cant do much until May anyways, since my weekends are spent writing papers.

When Clearwire’s goal was to sell wholesale access and provide fast Internet for everyone, the fact that it owned about 160MHz of 2.5GHz spectrum in major metro areas wasn’t a big deal because it was planning on wholesaling the spectrum to carriers it could come to financial terms with. That spectrum was essentially available to all carriers. But not anymore.

With Sprint (or Dish, maybe) acquiring them completely, the rules for ownership change – that spectrum is no longer available to everyone. Instead, it’s locked to Sprint and its MVNOs. And if you think from that viewpoint, the rules of ownership change. Verizon thinks that, and I think that way too.

I’ve already talked about my idea for rebanding the BRS/EBS range so that carriers can get access to the spectrum, while still giving Sprint a huge leg up (Sprint would still end up with 100MHz TDD spectrum, and 80MHz FDD would be either given to incumbent owners or auctioned off). The FCC might even have a stricter viewpoint than me, giving Sprint less than what I suggest. Other carriers (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T) could make good use of that spectrum instead of just letting Sprint sit on it.

Spectrum is a public good and should be treated as such. Giving Sprint nearly all the BRS/EBS band doesn’t serve the public interest if its going to take 10+ years to use it all (various technical reasons prevent them from using all of it now – most notably how much power would be needed to broadcast a signal from a device over a 100MHz range, the effective bandwidth currently is 20-40MHz; they could setup multiple 40MHz bands but you wouldn’t be able to aggregate them efficiently from a power standpoint).

The BRS/EBS band went through one overhaul in the mid/late 2000s decade. But it seems like it needs another overhaul to deal with the current LTE realities.

Currently, the spectrum is divided into 5.5MHz, 6MHz and 4MHz blocks. The usable spectrum is from 2495MHz to 2690MHz. Not very clean and uniform. Its licensed on both BTAs (basic trading areas, of which there are 487 of them) and 35-mile radius geographic service areas (not something my database knows how to deal with, unfortunately).

I would license them more uniformly, using CMAs or cellular market areas (of which there are 734 of them), but with a uniform block size of 10MHz chunks. I would divide the spectrum into two parts – a middle band that is for TDD technologies (TD-LTE), and on either side FDD technologies (FD-LTE, what all carriers use today). The band plan would start at 2495MHz with four 10MHz uplink blocks, a 5MHz guard band, five 20MHz TDD blocks, another 5MHz guard band, and finally the other four 10MHz downlink blocks paired with the uplink blocks.

Dealing with current licenses is what makes this tricky, if not impossible. Pending the Sprint/Clearwire merger, I’d venture to say that Sprint controlling nearly the entire 190MHz (they average 160MHz in major metro areas), I’d say that its time for them to divest some of those holdings (or terminate the leases or however they hold the spectrum). I really don’t see a use case for more than 100MHz for Sprint even in the next 10 years. There is a limit of 40-50MHz before the radios would consume too much power for use in a cell phone (thats not to say that in the aggregate, all the phones on the network couldn’t use it; they would just choose which 40MHz to broadcast in). In markets where they hold more than 100MHz of spectrum (most large ones), I’d simply give them the 100MHz TDD block. The remaining TDD and other FDD blocks would be auctioned or given to current non-Clearwire owners.

(what follows is a bit of a rant on spectrum ownership and usefulness for the average citizen)

Sprint owning most of the 2.6GHz band is a good strategic position for them, but the main goal for the FCC is (or should be) that the spectrum is being used in the best interests of the people. And I don’t think Sprint sitting on most of the spectrum, letting it go unused, is in the interest of the people of the United States. If they hold 190MHz of spectrum in a market, and they only plan on using 40MHz or even 100MHz over the next 5-10 years, then its time to give up enough of the spectrum so other companies can make use of it, and provide a more competitive marketplace for customers.

I look at the AWS-1 band – the only companies that really use it right now are 1) small/rural carriers and 2) T-Mobile (3G/HSPA+, LTE in 2013). The other major owners of AWS-1 spectrum – AT&T, Verizon and until recently the cable companies – don’t use it at all (some cable companies like Cox did launch a cellular company, but their 3G data service was provided by Sprint’s network, and their AWS-1 spectrum was unused since they never launched LTE before selling the spectrum). So from 2008 to today, large parts of the AWS-1 block have laid fallow. Verizon will likely build out their auxiliary LTE network (for metro areas) on their AWS-1 spectrum, but even that isn’t likely to begin until 2014 since it will likely be an LTE-Advanced network with 20MHz uplink/downlink channels where available (NYC, LA, etc). So the spectrum will likely lie fallow for a total of 7 years (2008-2015, when the first build-out requirements pass for Verizon) before its put to good use. A cautionary tale of letting companies buy and then sit on spectrum for competitive advantage. Exhibit 2: Verizon owning lower 700MHz “B” block licenses in major metro areas (LA, Chicago, Miami) and not doing anything with them. Likely, they’ll be sold to AT&T at the last minute and AT&T would expand their LTE from 5+5 to 10+10 (much to the pleasure of the residents of these cities). Again, sitting on spectrum for competitive advantage is a negative for the consumer. Build-out requirements are helpful in this, but four years is still a long time for carriers to sit on spectrum that could otherwise be used.

So this week was apparently a productive one for the FCC. Or maybe they wanted to clear off their docket for the new year.

• The use of WCS licenses for LTE was approved by the FCC, along with the spectrum transfers from various companies to AT&T. This will give AT&T 20MHz of LTE (10 up, 10 down) in most parts of the country. Future deals with the remaining spectrum holders in the WCS band could give them a nationwide footprint for WCS. Those remaining companies include Sprint. AT&T expects to deploy this in three years. This spectrum is located at 2.3GHz, and will be considered a “high band” with respect to Qualcomm’s WTR1605L (the other high band is the 2.6GHz spectrum that is mostly owned by Clearwire/Sprint). 
• The approval of the AWS-4 band currently owned by Dish Network. This will add 40MHz of LTE-Advanced within four years. Dish fought hard but failed to keep the FCC from placing limits on the lower 5MHz of their 20MHz upstream channel. Dish will likely only be able to use 15MHz of upstream and 20MHz of downstream. Dish is currently mulling whether or not they will start their own cellular network, or sell the spectrum (and see a huge windfall, since the spectrum was bought out of bankruptcy for around 2B but could fetch a price as high as 6B). This spectrum is at 2Ghz and 2.2GHz, and is considered a “mid band” like PCS and AWS.
• The approval of the PCS-H block (10MHz, 5+5), likely to be sold to Sprint in an auction by the end of 2013. This 5MHz block will allow Sprint to increase their LTE downstream channel from 5MHz to 10MHz. However, power restrictions on the upper 3MHz of their upstream channel may force them to keep their uplink at 5MHz (again, not a big deal, bandwidth is in demand from the internet to the user, not the user to the internet). This is an extension of the currently used PCS band.

It was a great week for wireless warriors – 70MHz more for LTE will be available to various companies to increase throughput and user speeds. The downside is that it’ll take 3-4 years for all of it to get here for the major metro areas (40% population), and 6-7 years for it to reach 70% of the population.

I’m not entirely sure if this is technically possible (I think it might but I’m not sure), but here is my idea so far on the whole Dish/Sprint PCS-H vs AWS-4 battle royale with the FCC.

1. Move Dish uplink up 5MHz (2005-2025MHz).
2. In a concession to Dish for dealing with the inconvenience, also give them PCS-J block (really AWS-4 “C” block, now 2000-2005/2175-2180MHz), subject to transmit power and other restrictions to keep it from interfering with PCS-H.
3. Auction PCS-H (presumably to Sprint, for around $1B) with rules about filtering off at the high end (2000MHz) necessary for adjacent small cell compatibility.

The idea is that the new AWS-4 “C” block could be used for small cells sometime in the future, adjoining Dish’s existing spectrum, and buffering the uplink from the PCS downlink. Transmit power would be limited on the 2000-2005MHz range, but that should be tolerable for small cells (and maybe just one 3MHz uplink channel). Since smaller cells are a part of LTE-Advanced anyways (HetNets and DASes and all), this spectrum will likely be useful to someone, and it might as well go with Dish now rather than the FCC sit on it for 5 years and we have another squabbling match in 2017. As long as Sprint and Dish can play nicely together about avoiding interference  then they can both get something from this deal.

Tim Farrar pointed out that bandwidth demands aren’t increasing on a per-device basis (though as more people get smartphones, overall traffic continues to increase). To me it seems obvious this is a result of data caps, and given the performance I’ve had with my iPhone 5 so far it seems like the spectrum crunch is easing (I’ll reserve final judgment until after Christmas and the holidays to see how the LTE networks hold up). The telecoms are pushing hard on things like LTE-Adv, hetnets, microcells, and 40MHz LTE, but what good is all that coverage and 25Mb/s data speed all if you still have a 2GB or 3GB monthly cap for $30/mo? Or 10GB of data to share between 4 people for $120/mo?

Given that both AT&T and Verizon in most areas are only using a 10+10MHz LTE network (20MHz total, or about 20% of their total spectrum capacity), and speeds are still fairly fast for me while out on the go (10Mb/s down, 10Mb/s up on AT&T for me), I don’t see what the big deal is over spectrum anymore. Yeah, we’ll need a little more spectrum, I’d venture to say about another 50MHz per major carrier before 2020, but as long as the prices for data transfer caps stay where they are, people are going to adjust their habits to keep their monthly bills in check. And as the unlimited data plans fade away (due to devices failing and upgrades requiring capped plans), those users are going to have to check their data usage (no more spending all day watching or listening to movies on Netflix over the cellular network).

With the plans currently in place, all four major carriers probably have enough spectrum for the next 4 years. By 2016 the picture will look quite different — AT&T has 20MHz of LTE now, and will have another 20 with WCS, and then whatever it can refarm on PCS (10MHz per market), so an average of 50MHz of LTE per market. Verizon will have 40-60MHz of LTE in metro areas – 20 in 700MHz and 20-40 in AWS. Sprint will likely end up with 20MHz nationwide (PCS G+H blocks) plus what it holds in the SMR spectrum (17MHz avg nationwide), plus Clearwire’s TD-LTE. T-Mo will have 40MHz LTE in the AWS band in most major areas, plus I expect them to pick up more spectrum in the future AWS-3 (extended AWS-1) and the 600MHz incentive auctions. Beyond the big four, we’ll also see Dish Network try to get in the game with their 40MHz of spectrum, building a pure LTE-Adv network, plus whatever they may pick up in auctions.

So why not divert some of the spectrum away from cellular carriers, and towards metro-area wireless broadband? I’d love to see the 70MHz in the 1.3GHz spectrum identified in the recent PCAST report not used for cellular but rather for metro WiFi. Lower frequency, better propagation, set stuff up on light poles and let people hook up to it, use an updated protocol that can handle 100+ devices, etc. Some of the spectrum identified might be better suited for backhauls to sites as well (3.6GHz), rather than tower to handset.

There is still a lot of work ahead for the transition to LTE, a process that will take a long time (3G networks wont be shut off until the early 2020s). And there are spectrum needs for the next few years to manage that and other future transitions. But with the growth in mobile traffic trailing off due to carriers successfully altering consumer behavior, the worries about a future wireless apocalypse doesn’t seem realistic anymore.

Originally, this site was born out of the failed AT&T and T-Mobile merger, I wanted to see how much spectrum AT&T would have had if it were complete.

So now we have T-Mo and MetroPCS merging. It makes sense, T-Mo needs to bolster its LTE spectrum, and Metro is a relatively cheap way to do that.

From here, I’d like to see Sprint (after they get bought by Softbank) to buy Leap/Cricket. From there, T-Mo and Sprint can trade spectrum – MetroPCS’s PCS spectrum can go to Sprint (along with a fair amount of cash), Leap’s AWS spectrum would go to T-Mo to finish bolstering their AWS LTE plans. It would set the stage for more band consolidation — the idea that carriers will want to be on as few bands as possible to make the phones easier and less expensive to engineer, and to make it so future phones can operate on all their bands without needing a 12-band RF switch.

On a forward looking perspective, more auctions in different spectrum bands (600MHz, extended AWS-1, AWS-4, 3.6GHz, etc) means that future phones wont be able to support all these bands, plus the ones they support now, plus support international roaming. So we might see band consolidation. Short term movement in this area would be AT&T and T-Mobile trading their PCS for AWS where available – for example, my map shows San Francisco having 25MHz of T-Mobile spectrum in the PCS band after the MetroPCS acquisition. They could trade 5MHz of that to AT&T for 5MHz AWS spectrum in Dallas, TX, for example.

In the long rung, AT&T and Sprint would have 3G and LTE in PCS, plus a lower frequency (700, SMR respectively) and higher frequency (WCS, BRS respectively). Verizon would have LTE in two places (700, AWS) and T-Mobile would have it in one (AWS). I could see T-Mo try to buy up the 600MHz spectrum to try and have both a high and low band for LTE, but beyond that, I don’t see how much more spectrum is needed for the big four.