How Many Spectrum Licenses are Changing Hands? September 30, 2024 08:26
The answer to this question provides a view into how dynamic the spectrum landscape is in a particular country and for this exercise, we are focused on the United States Mobile Carrier landscape covering 600 MHz to 4 GHz.
We are going to look at the changes in an 8 month time period by comparing the ownership for each frequency block in each county. In total, our Spectrum Grid breaks the Mobile Carrier spectrum into 210 individual blocks of spectrum for each county.
In the table below the total blocks changed are displayed by NR frequency band.
| Band | n71 | n12 | n26 | n66 | n41 | n77 |
| Blocks Changed | 108 | 158 | 18,304 | 1,502 | 3,048 | 266 |
Two different events explain the top 2 affected bands. First, our analysis time period overlapped with Dish's decision to not purchase the 800 MHz SMR spectrum, thus it changed hands back to T-Mobile. Second, T-Mobile was finally granted their Auction 108 licenses so those licenses changed hands from FCC control to T-Mobile.
Outside of these two events, it is clear that a significant number of licenses changed hands in the analyzed time period. Knowing which licenses are changing hands in which markets will change the engineering solutions and configurations for all of the radio frequency systems in these markets. If your business doesn't track those changes, you will be making business and engineering decisions with incomplete or erroneous data.
