Spectrum Reductions due to CBRS Consent Decree Tue, Aug 09, 2022

Previously we have written about the CBRS Consent Decree between the FCC and SAL Spectrum, Cable One, NorthWestern Corporation, US Cellular Corporation, and Shenandoah Cable Television.  Each of these CBRS auction winners had an investment from Black Rock, Inc greater than 10% interest.  Below are charts that reflecting each carrier's auction winnings, the licenses that they requested following the consent decree, and changes to each carriers market assignments. 

Looking at the Combined Blackrock from the Auction Results table, there are many markets where the combined group has auction spectrum allotments of 60MHz.  In the Updated License table, many markets went from being above the 40MHz limit to being below the 40MHz limit.  This is primarily due to SAL Spectrum (ATNI) declining any spectrum assignments in virtually all of these markets.

The last column to highlight is the GAA Increase column in the Change table.  This column reflects the net increase in GAA available spectrum in each market since the FCC is not planning to reauction this spectrum since it can still be utilized through the GAA usage process. 

 Arkansas and Illinois:

Missouri:

Maryland, Montana, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin:

Determining Unissued CBRS Licenses Tue, Dec 14, 2021

Earlier this month, the FCC announced that they finally released (granted) the CBRS PAL licenses won in Auction 105 by Cross Telephone Company.  I thought that this would be a good opportunity to show how the Transactions module in our Web Spectrum Viewer can be used to determine the status of pending transactions. 

As an introduction, our Transaction module includes all of the transactions affecting the mobile carrier and millimeter wave spectrum bands, going back to 2014.  We capture each of these transactions when they are posted on the FCC Daily Digest and update their status monthly until they are granted.

To find the unissued CBRS licenses, we set the filters to only include the CBRS spectrum transactions, for new licenses, that still have a pending FCC status.

After setting these filters, the results can be exported as an Excel file.

Finally, since the Transaction export includes a record for each license  that a carrier will receive, I am going to apply a pivot table in Excel, to summarize the 2857 matching records.  In the table below, you can see the bidding names for the companies that have not received their CBRS licenses and the count of their outstanding licenses.  Cross Telephone is still on this list, because the transactions list is updated monthly with the currently list indicating all of the transactions through the end of November.  The Cross Telephone licenses were granted on December 10, 2021 so they will be reflected in the January transaction file update.