Changes in the 28 GHz Landscape December 12, 2024 18:57

In late November, Mike Dano highlighted that T-Mobile had cancelled over 500 millimeter wave licenses where they didn't want to meet the buildout obligations. Upon investigating the cancelled licenses further, we found that all of the cancelled licenses were 28 GHz licenses. It would seem that the 28 GHz licenses would be more difficult to meet the covered population criteria for substantial service since each of the licenses are for individual counties. The other millimeter wave licenses are PEA market licenses, providing at least one population dense county where a significant portion of the PEA population can be served.

To see the collective effect of these license cancelations we are going to look at the 28 GHz licenses that were in FCC control before T-Mobile cancelled their slew of licenses. Our database management process for the Web Spectrum Viewer and Spectrum Ownership Analysis Tool allow us to assign cancelled licenses to the FCC. The FCC ULS system doesn't allow unissued license areas to be queried, and cancelled licenses are also difficult to identify.

In the map below, the 28 GHz licenses in FCC control are displayed. Most of the license areas are low population counties that didn't receive bids in the 28 GHz auction.

To quantify the licenses in the FCC's control before T-Mobile's license cancelation we will look at the Licensed Population metric. Before T-Mobile cancelled some of their 28 GHz licenses, the FCC already controlled licenses covering over 27 million people.

The map below shows the 28 GHz licenses now in the FCC inventory. Comparing the before and after maps in can be seen that all of the before licenses were full 425 MHz channels. The red areas in the after map represent the partial license areas that T-Mobile gave back to the FCC. This map also shows all of the additional areas that the FCC controls.