C-band Interim and Future Licenses Thu, Aug 12, 2021

On July 23rd, the FCC granted most of the C-band (Auction 107) licenses. This provided us the first opportunity to see how the FCC was going to handle the interim A block licenses that will transition into the permanent license on December 31, 2023.  The FCC provided call signs for each of the permanent licenses as well as call signs for each of AT&T's interim licenses.

These interim and future designations allow us to highlight a unique capability of our Web Spectrum Viewer and Mobile Carrier - Spectrum Ownership Analysis Tool.   For each block of spectrum we capture the spectrum licensee and the carrier that may lease the spectrum.  This information indicates the current operator.  Typically the current operator is the future operator, unless a pending transaction allocates that spectrum block to a different operator.  We are using this database capability to reflect the interim C-band licenses with the current operator field and the permanent operator with the future operator field.  You can see the AT&T interim allocations below as we are displaying the "Current" Spectrum Ownership Grid. 

Current View:

The future allocations are seen in the Future View below.

Future View:

Another way that this current and future ownership data can be seen is in our Spectrum Survey.    The Spectrum Survey provides the call sign, current operator, and future operator for all of the frequency bands in a selected county.  

Spectrum Survey:

CBRS and C-band Spectrum Tracking Mon, Feb 11, 2019

In the February 2019 release of our Mobile Carrier - Spectrum Ownership Analysis Tool, we have added the framework to visualize and analyze the Citizen's Band Radio Service (CBRS) and the C-Band satellite spectrum. 

The CBRS spectrum is broken into 10 - 10 MHz channels which will have 7 channels available for Priority Access Licenses (PAL) licenses and 3 licenses that are reserved for General Authorized Access (GAA).  When this spectrum is auctioned, licensees will not get specific channels but they will be allocated 10 MHz for each PAL license through the Spectrum Access System (SAS).  Our spectrum depth tools will summarize the available spectrum capacity that a carrier controls in the CBRS band similar to their AWS1 or PCS capacity that we currently track.

We have initially configured the C-Band spectrum in 20 MHz channels for a total allocation of 180 MHz. Like the CBRS spectrum we have assigned the initial ownership of the licenseable block to the FCC so users can see the total allocation in our spectrum depth summary tables.

Our spectrum depth tables provide users with frequency band breakdowns along with low band, mid band, and high band summaries.  We include the CBRS and C-band spectrum in our High band category because the coverage performance for those bands is not equivalent to the other mid-band spectrum frequencies.  High band spectrum also includes the WCS (2.3 GHz) and EBS/BRS (2.5 GHz).  We continue to denote spectrum above 6 GHz as Millimeter Wave spectrum in our Millimeter Wave - Spectrum Ownership Analysis Tool.