Tracking the FirstNet Opt-in Responses and their Cumulative Effect (Licensed Population) August 8, 2017 06:30

As more states have have announced that they have agreed to opt-in for a nationwide public-safety broadband network that will be built and operated by AT&T, we are going to look at Spektrum Metrics Insights' tools to see several ways that the effects of these opt-ins can both be seen and analyzed.  All of our products are updated monthly to reflect the continuous change in the US licensed spectrum landscape.

The first view is the county by county view in the Web Spectrum Viewer.  In the screen shot below, we are looking at the current owners of the public-safety spectrum (the right 2 columns) which highlight the counties/states where Firstnet (FSN) is still the assigned current owner.  In this view, you can see the New Jersey counties in the New York CMA, the New Jersey counties in the Philadelphia CMA, and the Michigan counties in the Detroit CMA; are all opting in for an AT&T operated network.

Selecting one of the county channel cells coded with FSN (Bronx county, NY) will reveal a detailed view of a non-opt-in county.  FirstNet is still licensed for that channel, and the current operator, but AT&T is still expected to be the future operator.

An AT&T coded cell (Somerset county, NJ) will reveal a detailed view of a opt-in county.  AT&T is indicated as the licensee, as well as the current and future operator of that channel.

Last, we are going to use the Channel Licensed POPs module from the Mobile Carrier - Spectrum Ownership Analysis Tool to determine how much of the US Population is locked in with AT&T operating the FirstNet spectrum.

Looking under the column for PSBB (Public Safety Broadband), you can see that with the existing 6 states that have opted-in, AT&T controls the FirstNet spectrum over a population of 42 million or roughly 13% of the US population (322 million total).  You can also see the population percentages that AT&T can reach with each of the other 700 MHz channels that they own or lease across the country.