FCC Sets Date for Major Midband Spectrum Auction for 5G
martyb writes:
FCC Sets Date for Major Midband Spectrum Auction for 5G:
The Federal Communications Commission is moving forward on its plans to auction off a key sliver of midband spectrum licenses for 5G service. The agency voted unanimously Thursday to seek comment on bidding rules for the auction, which is set to start on June 25, 2020.
The 3.5 GHz spectrum, known as the Citizens Broadband Radio Service, is coveted midband spectrum that big carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile see as valuable for 5G. But it's also spectrum that small rural fixed wireless service providers say can help them increase speeds and reach more customers.
Midband spectrum is considered valuable for 5G, because its propagation properties offer wireless carriers a good balance between coverage and speed. Up to this point, the FCC has focused much of its effort in auctioning off high-frequency spectrum, which delivers very high speed services over short distances. The FCC's 3.5 GHz auction next year is the first time the auction will release a significant amount of midband spectrum for commercial use.
[...]For years, the 3.5 GHz spectrum band has been mainly allocated for use by the Department of Defense radar systems. But the agency realized in 2015 that the spectrum was well-suited for 5G. Since then it's worked to recraft usage rules to open up the spectrum for non-federal. This included establishing a novel spectrum management concept known as the Citizens Broadcast Radio Service (CBRS). This framework, includes various tiers of access for the spectrum in order to allow the airwaves to be shared among different users. Some of the spectrum is unlicensed, some is allocated to the government and other licenses will be auctioned off to wireless carriers.
A key aspect of this arrangement is the management of the spectrum by third-party Spectrum Access System (SAS) managers, which will automatically coordinate the use of the spectrum among its various types of users in real-time.
See, also, Wikipedia's entry on S Band which covers frequencies from 3-30 GHz.
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