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.